


sleepwalk back to the battle site

by ftmsteverogers



Series: good sense won't venture [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Happy Ending, M/M, mlm author, revenge road trip, very brief holocaust mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-29
Updated: 2015-03-29
Packaged: 2018-03-20 02:55:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3634029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ftmsteverogers/pseuds/ftmsteverogers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m going to track down every HYDRA agent that’s left,” Bucky says, buckling his gun deftly to his belt.  “And then I’m going to kill them.”</p><p>“Oh,” Steve says.</p><p>“Come with me?” Bucky asks, dangerous hands tucked into his pockets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sleepwalk back to the battle site

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to adastra03, who has been gunning for a revenge road trip since day one.
> 
> Title is from Matches To Paper Dolls by Dessa.

* * *

 

PART ONE

 

* * *

 

Steve falls into the Potomac reaching for Bucky’s hand.  He has failed at reaching Bucky twice, now, but at least this time it is him with the wind howling in his ears, it is his back that hits the water with a crack like shattering bone.

 

* * *

 

“Shh,” someone says, smoothing back the hair from Steve’s forehead.  One of Steve’s eyes won’t open, but the other one blinks blearily before fluttering closed once more.  He tries to make words— _where am I, what happened, why am I not dead_ —but nothing forms on his cotton-thick tongue.  There is a glint of metal that he can see through his eyelashes.  There is a hand smoothing through his hair. 

“Don’t leave,” Steve croaks, chapped lips stinging when they move.  “Not again.”

“Shh.”  Fingers, curling through his hair.  A cool press of metal to his cheek.  “Shh.”  Steve hears the click of the morphine button, and feels the thick pull of the medicine tug at him as it feeds into his veins—it’s sick, the familiarity with which he’s pulled under, but it’s no less familiar for its sickness.  His last waking thoughts are about the water, about the way his spine ached when he hit the river.  Haunted eyes looking down at him, the regret that looped itself around his ankles to drag him down further into the deep. 

The hand stays in his hair, even when Steve hits the Potomac on repeat in his head, even when he opens his mouth to call out for a dead man.  The hand stays there, cool, but it warms as it rests against his skin.

 

* * *

 

“How am I alive?” Steve rasps once he can sit up for a while.  Natasha is perched at the foot of his hospital bed, playing solitaire, her hair smooth and perfect as it falls to her shoulders.  She glares at him when he moves his foot a little and upsets her little row of aces.

“I don’t know, I wasn’t there when it happened,” is all she says, flipping a jack of spades neatly onto a queen of diamonds. 

“That’s a shitty answer,” Steve says, and winces as he leans forward to move a stack of cards onto a ten, revealing the six that she’s been searching for in vain.

Natasha sighs.  “Quit backseat driving,” she says mildly, and Steve knows she’s hiding something, but he doesn’t have the energy to call her out on her silence.  Instead, he sits, and complains, and knocks over her cards with his foot when it becomes clear that she’s going to lose.  He tells himself not to think about Bucky when she throws her hands up in exasperation.  He doesn’t succeed.

Sam comes by later with coffee for Natasha and a half-eaten bagel that Steve finagles off of him with wheedling and a couple blatant, poorly-implemented guilt trips.  He watches Sam and Natasha bicker over who gets Sam’s donut, and he eats, focusing on the physical acts of biting.  Chewing.  Swallowing.  Cream cheese.  New York.  Bucky rolling his eyes and tossing his hands up, saying _one of these days you’re gonna run off where I can’t follow, Steve, I swear to god we’re gonna end up halfway to hell before you know it_ —

And Steve, oh, Steve is already in hell, but he suspects Bucky knows it better than he does.

 

* * *

 

He dreams that Bucky sits at the edge of his bed and kisses him.  He knows it’s a dream because his eyes open easily and Bucky looks back at him without wincing away from his gaze.  “Hey, pal,” Bucky whispers, hair short and slicked back from his face, and kisses him again.  Both of his hands are warm when he cradles Steve’s face between them.  Steve kisses him back, over and over, even when the kisses start to taste like salt water, even when Bucky’s mouth against his own feels colder and colder until Steve realizes that he’s kissing a dead man.  He recoils, a scream in his throat—

But then he’s wrenching himself awake with a start, sitting up and clutching at his throat, gasping, eyes wild.  The window is open.  The curtains billow out and collapse again with the sluggish breath of the wind.  His sheets are tangled up with his legs, trapping him, the outline of his body visible underneath the hospital sheets wrapped tight around his limbs.  He wrenches his legs free, hisses a pained breath through his teeth, and kicks his feet up and out until he’s lying on his back, panting, sweat-slick from exertion and freezing in the cold air that comes in from the window. 

He turns his head to the side, swallowing the breath that comes into his mouth with some difficulty.  He thinks there might be a handprint on the window, dead in the center, fingerprints fanned out wide like it’s been put there on purpose.  Like it’s a bird that hit the window and not a hand.

 

* * *

 

Days spent in a hospital bed are days that he had hoped he would not have to relive, after the serum took his cells and rearranged them into something wild and overgrown.  Any wounds he’d sustained on the battlefield had been patched up only briefly; it never took him long to heal, and he’d never acquired much damage that needed patching up, really, let alone an extended hospital visit.  Lying here, with the starched white sheets and the pale green walls—nurses chattering as they pass down the hall, the faint sound of the heart monitor putting his teeth on edge—he’s brought back to the old days, the thick Brooklyn summers lying in a hospital bed he couldn’t afford with Bucky slumped over in a chair next to his bedside, asleep.  Bucky’s quiet breathing was a comfort that Steve had never had the humility to ask for. 

He had always been grateful for Bucky’s presence, though, even if Bucky was unconscious; Bucky’s sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, collar unbuttoned as soon as the nurse left them be, and Steve could see the dark smudges of dirt and oil and rope burn up his forearms, the forty-five degree angle of his bent elbows as he tipped his head to one side and breathed with the slow, deep assurance of someone who knew they weren’t going to die in their sleep.

And Steve would watch him, Steve would lie in his bed and watch him, eyes caught on the way his face unfolded into something young and ever so slightly fragile in sleep.  Sometimes he would let himself reach out a hand and brush through the fringe falling messily over Bucky’s face, but he quickly learned to shutter the affection burning in his eyes the moment Bucky stirred.  He taught himself how to look and not touch, mostly, how to look with his eyes instead of his graphite-stained fingertips. 

“He’s my _family,_ you sons of bitches, he _is_ , he _is_ —” Bucky had wailed, held back by the nurses when Steve had been rushed into the hospital—heatstroke, they’d learn later, because Steve never had been good at pacing himself, never been good at taking his life in sips, even when it would have been smarter for him to hang back and wait for his body to catch up with him.  Running, not walking, that was the way Steve careened through his life.

Steve had tried to watch Bucky as he was wheeled down the hall on a gurney, but his head was too heavy, and all he could hear was Bucky’s increasingly colorful snarling as he was wheeled into a crisp room not dissimilar to the one he’s in now.  He can remember the weight of those words that followed him in— _“He’s my family, you motherfuckers—”_ —and the way it pressed down between his shoulder blades.  He can remember the look of agony on Bucky’s face, he can remember the sheepish, roughed-up twist of Bucky’s smile when he finally managed to bully his way into the hospital room.

Steve lies in his bed, now, waiting for Natasha or Sam to scrape him back from the abyss in his head, and he replays those sick-soured memories over and over again in his head, eyes open and unseeing, barely noticing when his eyelashes grow wet.

 

* * *

 

“I think he was here,” Steve says, tying his shoelaces slowly.  His head is still fuzzy from the morphine, and the ridge over his right eye throbs gently, but the doctor has cleared him to be released, and to be perfectly honest, Steve is willing to take any opportunity offered to him to escape from the hospital’s antiseptic-smell embrace.

“Who?” Sam asks, holding out Steve’s coat so Steve can shoulder into it carefully.  “Barnes?”

“Yeah.”  Steve can feel his stitches stretch a little with his movements, and he thinks about the scars that are now on his body, wonders if he’ll keep them for long.  The serum makes healing faster, inevitable.  Time can’t touch him now.  “He was here.”  He can feel Bucky’s presence aching at the base of his skull, trickling down his spine like beads of sweat.  He can feel him like a bruise.  Like a scar.

“I don’t know, man,” Sam says dubiously, rolling the hospital wheelchair around for Steve to clamber into it.  “Nat and I were here pretty much ‘round the clock.”

Steve allows himself to be steered out of the hospital room, but his gaze lingers on the way his sheets fold at the foot of his bed, the way the fluorescent light drips onto them like it’s raining, like it’s dropping shards of glass onto the bed.

 

* * *

 

He’s tempted to sleep for a week, but it’s only a couple of days before he’s back on his feet again.  It used to be that illness and death hung over him like a grim promise—he has enough distance now to find vague humor in the fact that he tried to die twice, now, and was dragged back to shore both times against his will.  Was it against his will?  He doesn’t know.  He doesn’t want to ask himself that question.

Later, he fills up his bathtub, nauseated slightly by the sound of running water.  Once the tub is filled, he steps inside, right foot first, then left foot—he tests his weight carefully, toes curling to find purchase against the porcelain.  Warm bathwater laps against his ankles, his calves, leaving his skin cold and slick in the wake of the little eddies.  He inhales carefully, exhaling around the shards of fear that are lodged deep in his throat.  If he closes his eyes, he can almost taste the way the salt brine tasted as it forced its way down his throat.  If he closes his eyes, he can feel the burn of the Potomac in his nose.

He lasts ten breaths, standing in the bathtub with his jeans rolled up to his knees before he is scrambling out again and leaving wet footprints in his wake.  _This is progress_ , he thinks, as he sits on the lip of the tub to dry his feet with a towel and watches the water circle down the drain.  _This is progress_.

 

* * *

 

The fact of the matter, at its heart, is that Steve’s house doesn’t feel like a home.  No matter how hard he tries to make it feel lived in, none of the rooms look like they belong to a living being—he certainly tries hard enough; he bought books and filled up his shelves, rearranged the furniture several times, and hung a couple pieces of art that Tony pushed at him in one of his brief fits of sporadic camaraderie.  He still winces at the sound of the door closing behind him every time he gets home, even with a geometric sailboat staring down at him judgmentally from his living room wall.

“I want to look for him,” he tells Sam, fidgeting at the kitchen table while Sam does the crossword.  Where Steve feels awkward and uneasy, Sam fills the room easily—it looks natural when Sam roots around in the fridge for orange juice, it looks normal when he perches himself on the counter with his ankles crossed as they dangle down.  (Steve can’t help but wonder if it actually is his apartment he feels out of place in, after all, or if it is the world at large, the world without Bucky in it.  Zola called him a man out of time and Steve is fighting it every step of the way, but it makes something like bile rise up in the back of his throat, so he knows it’s gotten to him.)

“Don’t have to ask to know who you’re talking about,” Sam sighs, cap of his pen held between his teeth while he contemplates the newspaper balanced on his lap.  “What’s our first move?”

Steve swirls his coffee around in his mug, mouth twisted up a little at one corner.  He can see his reflection looking up at him from the dark liquid below, and he doesn’t know if it’s the ripples or the pinched lines between his brows that make him look older, but he doesn’t like it, whatever the cause.  He swirls his coffee around in the mug the way Bucky used to, like a wine taster, but he doesn’t drink, just looks at the distorted echo of his eyes reflected back up at him.

“I’m gonna read the folder Nat gave me,” he says, and wets his lips with the tip of his tongue.  He can feel Sam’s eyes on him, gaze warm with an assurance that Steve has only ever seen make a home on Sam’s face.  “I’m gonna read Nat’s prediction of possible locations he’ll head to.  And then I’m gonna pick a direction and keep walking until I find him.”

Sam, to his credit, doesn’t seem surprised.  “That could take a lot of time,” is all he says, recapping his pen.  “We’d better get started soon.”

Steve offers him a small, tight smile.  “You don’t have to come,” he says, not for the first time.

“I know,” Sam says, also not for the first time, and smiles back, but his smile looks a great deal smoother on his face.  Steve doesn’t know how he does that, how he effortlessly takes his face and twists it into something so smooth, so painless.  “I’m coming anyway,” he says, shrugging, and nudges Steve’s foot under the table with his own.

“Alright,” Steve says.  He finishes his coffee.

 

* * *

 

There’s a post-it note stuck to the back cover of the manila folder, purple ink in Natasha’s crisp handwriting telling him that Bucky—she calls him the Winter Soldier—most likely hasn’t left the city yet.  Steve runs the pad of his thumb over the words and feels a strange shiver splinter through him, prickling at the base of his neck, like someone is walking over his grave.  Like his shadow has been shot through the heart.

He walks over to the window after he’s done reading, folder under his elbow, and looks out at the city, the rain grimly splattering the slick pavement outside.  There is more than one ghost in this city, he thinks.  This is a city full to the brim with ghosts.

He makes himself go to bed before dawn, but he doesn’t sleep.  He lies in bed and turns the past few weeks over and over again in his head, the rough slide from hour to hour, day to day, breath to breath.  There is no way that this will end well.  Bucky is somewhere in this city, sleeping in whatever hollow home he’s carved out of the concrete, and Steve is aching, Steve is aching to the core to think about his quiet, sleeping face.  Bucky is somewhere in this city, breathing.  Steve can’t stop thinking about him breathing.

 

* * *

 

In the morning, Steve walks down the hall, rubbing the heel of his hand over his eyes with a yawn, but pauses when he reaches the kitchen.  There is something off, and it takes a moment to identify what it is—everything is where he left it, as far as he can tell, but there is something wrong, and he hangs back in the doorway to the kitchen with a hand curled around the doorframe while he thinks about it.  The table is clear.  The window is locked. 

There is a dirty plate and a glass in the sink.

For a moment, Steve feels like his breath is caught in his lungs.  There is a dull roaring that begins to rush in his ears, the howling of winter wind in the Alps, and he clutches a little harder at the doorframe so he doesn’t slide down the door into sitting.  He’s tempted to.  Instead, he crosses to the sink and looks at the dirty dishes inside, biting his tongue, looking, just looking, not touching.  He stands there for a while, eyes snagged on the imprint of someone’s lower lip on the rim of the water glass, and he swallows hard against something sharp that forms in his throat as he watches. 

He picks up the water glass, weighing it carefully in his palm.  The smudge on the rim is obvious when held up to the light, and it makes the sharp thing in Steve’s throat splinter—this is not a mark from his mouth, he knows that it isn’t a mark made by his mouth, and there is only one person he can think of that would slip into his house in the dead of night to drink his tap water and carefully pick their way through his leftovers. 

That strange shiver slithers down Steve’s spine once more.  He doesn’t say Bucky’s name aloud, but it rattles around in his head like a runaway pinball, it clatters through his head like a runaway train.

He reaches for his phone, fumbling a little with the tiny buttons as he keys in Natasha’s number from memory.  He has a knack for memorizing little things like that: numbers, dates, places, turns of phrase, the way his friends take their coffee.  He’s never had it confirmed, but he wonders sometimes if the serum has affected his memory as well as his body—it is the inverse of Bucky’s experience, he is the exact convex curve to mirror the concave curl of Bucky’s shoulders.

“I’m on the road, so speak up,” Natasha instructs him without preamble when she picks up, voice low and tinny over the sound of traffic.

“You said in your note that he’s probably still in this city,” Steve says, sitting on the edge of his kitchen table, the sink directly in his line of vision.  He wants to keep it in front of himself so he never has to look away.  He doesn’t want to give it the opportunity to melt into the air when he isn’t paying attention, the way Bucky did when he saw him again for the first time, red marks on his face where his mask had dug into his skin, teeth bared, lips curled back.  Steve doesn’t take his eyes off the rim of the glass.  “How close do you think he’ll stick, exactly?”

“Well, I doubt he’ll be living in your back pocket,” Natasha says dryly.  Steve can hear the engine running on her end, wonders briefly where she’s driving.  “Why?  Found a lead?”

“Maybe,” Steve says, and worries the inside of his cheek between his teeth.  “I’m not sure.”

There is silence on the other end of the phone for a moment, and Steve fidgets with the chain of his dog tags while he listens to her breathe.  “He’s going to be unsteady,” she says eventually, reluctantly.  “When you find him.  He’s going to be unstable.  I know you don’t want to hear it, but he might be the kind of unstable that you can’t handle.”

Steve is smiling foolishly, though, he can’t help it.  “You said when.”

“Hm?”

“When.  You said _when_ I find him.” 

“Huh,” Natasha says, and she exhales something that isn’t too far away from a laugh.  “Guess I did.”

Steve scuffs a hand through his hair, sighing.  “Thanks, Nat.”

“Be careful, Steve,” she says, and shuts the phone off with an audible click.  Steve stares at the cellphone in his hand for a long moment, debating, and shoves it into his pocket with resolution seeming as long and as far away from himself as it has ever been.  The choice is agony: will he race out into the city, chasing after the imprint of Bucky’s boot heels on the pavement?  Will he stay at home, his eyes on the sink in front of him, waiting for more fingerprints to appear on his window, on his face, on his hands?

He reaches for the glass again, looking at the smudge of Bucky’s lip on the rim for an uncountable measure of time.  It could be seconds, it could be minutes, it could be decades that he stands there, watching the fluorescent kitchen lights glitter on the surface of the glass, his old, tired face reflected back at him. 

Slowly, carefully, he fits his own mouth to the print, ever so gently pressing his lower lip to the ghost of Bucky’s almost-kiss to the rim of the glass.  It is the closest he’s felt to Bucky in years.  It’s the closest he’s felt to Bucky since he’s been defrosted, since he’s been thawed out in this world that is only just starting to feel like something that isn’t a stranger.

 

* * *

 

In the end, he doesn’t tear through the city streets after Bucky’s retreating shadow, though he wants to, oh, does he want to.  He wants to, but he can’t in good conscience leave his house with Bucky’s fingerprints all over his kitchen, with the ghost of Bucky’s presence hanging low in his stomach when he looks around him.  He runs his fingertips over the counter and wonders if Bucky has touched there, he rests his forehead on the door frame and wonders if Bucky’s shoulder has brushed there when he entered, he opens his cupboards and wonders how many of the labels on the jars and cans Bucky has traced over with his fingertips.  Steve wants to touch every place that Bucky has touched.  He wants to run his mouth over every shadow that Bucky has left behind him.

He goes through the day on autopilot, going through the motions of his life, picking up the living room, doing the laundry.  Forces himself to eat.  Stands in the shower with his head hanging down, water flowing in rivulets down his spine.  Stands in front of the mirror afterward, towel wrapped around his waist, and has difficulty holding his hands still enough to shave.  He nicks the edge of his jaw and swears under his breath while he holds a washcloth to the red that trickles down his chin.  Studiously, he doesn’t look down at his chest, in the hopes of avoiding catching sight of the pink and puckered scars from the bullets that had hit him on the helicarrier.  (Once he starts to look, he discovers, he has difficulty _stopping_ ; he can spend hours poking at the circles in his flesh, fascinated, watching the way the light catches on the shiny pink skin.  It is the permanence that attracts him, he thinks, though this is a thought he keeps to himself.  It is hard to mark his body these days.) 

There are rules that he tried to follow: he doesn’t let himself look at the scars that litter his body when he already feels precarious in his head, he doesn’t follow the water that circles down the drain into another downward spiral.  He doesn’t let himself think about Bucky when he knows it will bring him to his knees.  He doesn’t let himself think about Bucky when he has a hand white-knuckled around his dog tags, other hand pressed over his mouth, every breath ragged until he can stifle himself into silence. 

“Way to go, Rogers,” he mutters to himself, wincing as he peels back the cloth so he can see the tiny mark that’s already done bleeding.  Another ten minutes and he won’t be able to tell that there was ever a cut.  Sighing, he wets the washcloth and wipes away the last traces of blood, tosses the cloth into the hamper, and steels himself up to face the rest of the day as he opens the bathroom door.

 

* * *

 

He leaves the window open that night, just a crack, just enough to invite DC’s resident ghost inside if the ghost so chooses.  He debates whether or not to leave a note, but once he is sitting on the couch with a pad of paper and a pen, he finds that he is unable to put any words onto the page.  It isn’t that he has nothing to say—he has far too many words in his head, so many things he wants to tell Bucky that he will either leave him a seven-page letter or nothing at all.  Nothing at all seems to be a much better option than the other alternative.

He smooths a hand over the slight concave indentation in the couch cushion next to himself and lets his fingers curl into claws over the soft fabric.  Did Bucky sit here?  Did Bucky hiss a tired breath through his teeth and let his head hang back against the back of the sofa the way he used to after a long day of working down at the docks?  Steve lets these thoughts wash over him in waves, but he does not let them take root in his heart, he does not lean into the centrifugal force as he rounds the bend in his head.  Instead, he stands up, crosses determinedly to the linen cupboard, and takes out an armful of blankets to drape over the arm of the couch.  Then he strides into his bedroom and retrieves a pillow to add to the pile.  Satisfied, he considers the dark window, worrying his lower lip between his teeth sharp enough to sting, and picks up the pen once more.

 _Take whatever you want from the fridge_ , he writes, and tears the page off the legal pad, walking into the kitchen so he can tape the note to the door of the refrigerator where it can’t be missed.  He lies his hand over the note, palm flat, thumb directly over the word _want_.  “What am I doing,” he breathes, but he leaves the note where it is, slightly off-center and crooked, the same way he used to hang his drawings—sketches of Bucky’s face at different angles, more often than not—for Bucky to stumble across when he came home at odd hours from the two or three different jobs he was juggling at any one time.

Steve shoots a glance at the window before he retreats down the hall toward his bedroom.  It is still cracked, still an open parenthesis, still an unsolved equation.  He tears his gaze away from it with some effort and pads down the hall in his sock feet, anticipation curling his spine into a question mark that he doesn’t have the heart to answer.

 

* * *

 

There is no sound that night to tip him off to Bucky’s presence, though he listens for it, hard, eyes open and unseeing as he strains to catch some small noise that will tell him that he hasn’t spent the entire day with his heart strangled in his hands for nothing.  There is nothing.  He feels like a child waiting up on Christmas Eve, guiltily doing his damnedest to stay awake to hear Santa coming down the chimney, but knowing there will be no sound until he sleeps, no sign of life apart from his own hammering heartbeat until he is sleeping and unaware of the world shifting around him.

There is no sound.  There is no sign.  He swallows his disappointment and rolls over in his bed onto his back, looking up at the ceiling with his mouth half parted, eyes half lidded.  Listlessly, he watches shadows slide over his ceiling as cars speed by on the street below, interrupting the shards of orange streetlight that splinter in fractals over his silent face.  Sleep, now, is as much of a stranger as it has ever been—for someone who lost seventy years of his life to sleep, Steve is bad at drifting off of his own accord.  Bucky had always been better at that, at taking the snatches of sleep that fell across his path.  He used to say that it came from the years he spent in the army, of having to take the minutes where he could catch them, but Steve has spent years in the same army and he still lies awake with something caught on his tongue that doesn’t move.  (Steve has always been reticent to name the knowledge that lives like a curse in his throat: Bucky has always been the better soldier of the two of them, Bucky is the one that managed to follow orders without choking on them the way Steve did.  The way Steve still does.)

He rolls over again, curling onto his side, and imagines Bucky’s arms wrapping around him the way they had when he’d been small and constantly within arm’s reach of his deathbed.  “Goodnight, Bucky,” he murmurs, eyes drifting closed, and thinks downstairs to the pile of blankets that he left on the couch.  There is nothing he would not give, in that slow, melancholy place between sleep and waking, to know that Bucky is wrapping himself in those blankets and keeping himself safe from the winter chill that Steve suspects is living in both their hearts.

 

* * *

 

Steve dreams that Bucky is tearing his own skin off in strips like bandages.  Steve watches him in horror, but Bucky doesn’t appear to be in any pain—he peels off his skin curiously, letting it fall to his feet in shreds.  There is no blood, but as soon as Bucky’s skin is torn off, metal glints below like a nauseating promise.  With every piece that is peeled up like old carpet, more metal is uncovered, until Bucky is unwrapping himself completely to reveal that he is made entirely of metal from head to foot.  His hair is the last thing to go.  Bucky pulls it from his head by the fistful, letting the dark strands fall to the floor all twined together.

“Thought so,” he says, resigned.  Two metal eyes raise to meet Steve’s, regret deep in their gaze.  “Sorry, pal.”

 

* * *

 

When Steve wanders into the kitchen in the morning, hair sticking up hopelessly in the back, he isn’t sure what he’s hoping to find.  A sign, maybe, but he doesn’t know what that will look like—will he recognize it when he sees it?  A flipped up corner of the rug, a smudge on a window, a shifted chair?  Steve doesn’t know what he’s looking for, only that he will look for it with the gaze of a starving man until he finds it and is satisfied.

The kitchen is just as he left it.  The food inside the refrigerator remains untouched, unaltered, his note still hanging lopsidedly on the door.  There is no sign in the kitchen that anybody has been there besides him—he casts around listlessly, opening and shutting cupboards, dragging his fingers across the counter and the tabletop until he’s left gouge marks into the wood.  They are nothing that would lead him to Bucky, but it feels good to make them anyway.

In the living room, the blankets are draped over the arm of the sofa the way that Steve left them, pillow resting neatly on top.  Steve touches the back of the couch and looks at the pillow, jaw clenched hard enough that he worries, briefly, that he will crack teeth.

There is a long, dark hair resting in the very center of the soft white indentation where Bucky’s head had lay.  There is a long, dark hair that curls over the pillow like an afterthought, like an unspoken promise.

 

* * *

 

“To be honest, I expected us to be in some tiny province in, like, Russia by now,” Sam admits, hands on his hips while he waits for Steve to tie his shoes.  Steve has been reticent to leave the house, reticent to get out of reach of Bucky’s shadow, but Sam tells him that a watched pot will never boil, and Steve supposes that a watched amnesiac best friend won’t boil either.  He’s going crazy, cooped up in his room.  Running will take his mind off his empty home.

“Natasha says he won’t go far,” Steve says, and stands, stretching his arms over his head briefly to feel his spine pop.  “And I think I’m gonna trust her judgement here.”

Sam watches him through narrowed eyes, but he seems to accept it, for which Steve is grateful.  He doesn’t want to put words to the suspicion that has taken root in his stomach, not when he isn’t certain if it is all in his head—the only physical evidence he has is one dark hair and a dirty glass that he refuses to put through the dishwasher.  It isn’t exactly anything that will hold up in court.

“You’re a lot less agitated than you were last week,” Sam notes, and starts toward the running path.

“Yep,” is all Steve says in response, and then they’re running, and words become unnecessary.

 

* * *

 

Steve can remember, deeply ingrained in him after decades spent at Bucky’s side, that Bucky is a creature of habit.  Of routine.  Bucky had been particular about what products he chose for his hair, the clothes he wore from their limited selection, the side of the bed he slept in—Steve can remember watching him do the same number of push-ups every morning, the same soft, labored sound of his breathing in the pre-dawn light, the way his back moved beneath his undershirt.  (Steve had always watched him then through his eyelashes with a peculiar kind of envy; not just the low-burning desire that flickered over his half-lidded eyes, but the jealousy that came with the knowledge that any labored breath in Bucky’s lungs was there by choice and not design.)  He used to lie in his bed and watch Bucky sweat, a damp spot appearing in between Bucky’s shoulder blades—Steve had always wanted to put his mouth directly over that spot, wanted to drag his tongue over the notch in Bucky’s spine and make the soft white cotton of his shirt see-through—

“What the hell,” Sam exclaims from the bathroom, snapping Steve out of his head.  He looks up, frowning, and is about to ask what the matter is when Sam shouts, “Steve, you need to get in here—”

He’s up off the living room sofa and running before Sam can finish his sentence, skidding to a halt in front of the bathroom door, regretting instantly that he hadn’t had the foresight to grab his shield on the way.

“What—” he starts, hanging in the doorway, but the words die in his mouth when he sees the mirror, cracked, the fractures spiraling out from a fist-sized circle a little to the right of the center.  He can’t swallow around his tongue, suddenly, he can only stare, mesmerized, as Sam picks up a shard of glass that fell inside the sink and holds it up to the light.

“Guess you were right about Natasha,” Sam says, turning the glass shard in his hand, watching the light glint off the surface.  “Your boy didn’t go far at all.”

“No, he sure didn’t,” Steve agrees, heart sinking when he sees two drops of blood caught on the rim of the sink.  They are dark red suspended on white porcelain—two rubies that glitter ominously under the yellow lights, and Steve can’t stop picturing them falling from Bucky’s split knuckles over and over on repeat in his head.  “Oh, god,” he says.  “He smashed the mirror with his right hand.”

Sam puts the shard down on the bathroom counter, careful not to nick his fingertips on the sharp, jagged edges.  Steve wants, vaguely, to scream.  He can feel it building up in his chest, but he knows with a tired sort of certainty that screaming won’t do anything constructive, as satisfying as it would be to release the sound that is tangled up in the back of his throat.  He picks up one of the other pieces, just to feel the weight, just to feel something that he knows with certainty is covered with Bucky’s fingerprints.

Somewhere out there, Bucky is putting his bloody knuckles to his mouth with a wince, bandaging them in whatever hideaway he disappears to when Steve is at home.  Somewhere out there, Bucky is bleeding, and no one is caring for him, no one is patching him up the way he used to clean up Steve every time Steve came home from a fight.  There is no one to sit Bucky on the edge of the bathtub, antiseptic and bandages in the medicine cabinet, no one to rinse off the blood and grime and smoke from the city off his skin—

“Hey, hey,” Sam is saying gently, his careful hands unwinding Steve’s fingers from where they’re clenched tight around the mirror shard in his palm.  Blood drips down his wrist, and for a moment, Steve is confused; he hadn’t felt the glass bite into his skin, but the evidence of it is there all the same.

“Oh,” he says, frowning, and lets Sam take the glass from his hand and put it back in the sink where it used to be.

“Sit,” Sam instructs.  Steve lets himself be sat on the toilet seat, bemused, while Sam opens up the medicine cabinet and retrieves a box of band-aids.  “It isn’t a deep cut, and you heal quick, but I’m gonna clean you up and stick a Transformers band-aid on you anyway.”

“Not Batman?” Steve asks, twitching a small smile.

“I’m saving that for a real emergency,” Sam answers, smiling back, and takes Steve’s hand so he can clean off the blood that is already drying in the spaces in between Steve’s fingers.

 

* * *

 

 _I took care of the mirror, don’t worry,_ Steve writes carefully onto a new post-it note.  _Food offer still stands._

He sticks it onto a neatly folded towel that he puts on the bathroom sink where Bucky will find it, and is comforted for a moment by the idea that Bucky can wash the blood from his own skin the way that Steve had let Sam wash it off of him—they will stand under the same water spray, separated only by time, both of their spines bathed in the same steam.  Steve imagines Bucky’s head bowed, long, dark strands of hair dripping down his face like black rivulets of water.  He likes the image that puts in his head, of Bucky, clean and warm, his blood washed gently off his skin and circled down the drain.  If only the other stains on their souls can be drained away as easily.

 

* * *

 

Steve keeps his refrigerator stocked with food.  He tries not to take inventory, but he notices things going missing from day by day, he can’t help it—he’s looking for Bucky’s presence in his home however he can get it, and he checks every morning to see whether or not Bucky is keeping himself fed.  It is reminiscent of the long winter nights when Bucky would drag himself home four hours before he’d have to get up again in the morning, smile tiredly at Steve, and worriedly glance at their empty breadbox when he thought Steve wasn’t looking.  Steve can afford to keep them both in bread and milk, now, but the worry is still there, that sickening worry that Bucky is going to go hungry.

The blankets that he set out for Bucky are always folded again by the time Steve walks down the hall, but his notes have begun to disappear from where he stuck them in convenient locations all over the apartment.  He keeps writing them.  Bucky keeps taking them.  He starts leaving out other things as well, silently offering anything he thinks Bucky might take if prodded—a new toothbrush, left resting on top of Bucky’s towel.  A pair of pajama pants, in Bucky’s size, draped over the back of the couch.  A note with a single red arrow pointing at a fresh pot of coffee that Steve starts before he goes to bed.  He can’t shake the feeling that he can make this a little better if he tries, if he makes a routine, if he sticks to it.  He can’t shake the feeling that their cohabitation means something important, but no matter how hard he racks his brain, he can’t figure out what it is.  Bucky needs him in some manner.  That much is clear.  Steve only wishes that he could know what he could do to make Bucky show his face, to make it obvious that Steve isn’t standing in his kitchen, arms elbow-deep in soapy water, weeping over empty glasses and ghosts for nothing.

 

* * *

 

“I’m still bitter about my personalized password,” Steve informs Tony, perched on one side of the workbench while Tony fiddles with some machinery on the other end.  He isn’t quite sure what Tony is making—in fact, he’s pretty sure neither of them are—but it’s comforting, the quiet click of needle-nose pliers twisting the multicolored wires. 

Tony blinks up at him from behind the stupid sunglasses that he’s wearing in a vain attempt to disguise the fact that his bloodshot eyes mean he isn’t sleeping again.  Pepper isn’t an idiot, though, and Steve knows it’s only a matter of time before she drags him to bed by the ear and sits on him until he goes to sleep.  “You don’t like ‘Captain Handsome’?” Tony asks, amused, and quirks an eyebrow.  “I mean, we can always go back to my first idea, but I thought you’d rather not have to sing ‘Star Spangled Man With A Plan’ every time you wanted to see me.  Which was my first choice, to be honest, but.  I’m saving that for when you really piss me off.”

“Never again,” Steve says grimly.  “And I mean it, if I have to hear that fucking jingle _one more time_ —”

“Who’s strong and brave, here to save the American way?” Tony warbles, off key and verging on the edge of cackling, Steve can hear it in his voice.  “Who vows to fight like a man for what’s right night and day—”

“No,” Steve says despairingly and lets his head drop into his palms.  Tony laughs, but he goes back to his fiddling without continuing on to the next verse, so Steve relents and picks up his head to watch him again after a moment or two. 

“Why’re you here, anyway?” Tony asks, frowning in concentration as he prods at the mess of metal and wires until it sparks, making him flinch.  “Fuck, yikes—I mean.  Last I heard, you had your hands full with your amnesiac boyfriend.”

“Fuck off,” Steve says mildly, and nudges Tony’s knee with his toe.  “It’s been a long couple of weeks.  It’d make me feel a lot better to watch your eyebrows catch fire.”

“It happens _one time_ and he doesn’t let me forget it,” Tony mutters to himself, but it’s verging on fond, and he bends back to his task without mentioning Bucky further.  Steve is grateful—he has no words to say on the subject that Tony can understand, nothing inside him that will make sense to any mind but his own fragmented smashed-mirror head.

He reaches for a pad of paper that is resting near Tony’s elbow, picking up a pencil as well so he can doodle aimlessly while listening to the quiet clink of Tony’s pliers.  He doesn’t ask what Tony’s making, and Tony doesn’t ask who he’s drawing—they fall into this pattern often, the two of them, quietly keeping each other company while they get lost in their own heads.  There is never any pressure, when it comes to Tony; Tony is so mired in his own guilt that he isn’t particularly bothered by Steve’s, no matter how vast it seems to be, no matter how much it tastes like ashes under Steve’s tongue.  It is a relief to be around someone who can understand the nausea of self-loathing that grips Steve’s stomach in a tight fist.

Steve listens to the low murmur of Tony muttering to himself and sketches out the vague shape of Bucky’s face, tipped up toward the sky, shattered-glass eyes closed, the sun bathing his skin in soft, warm light.

 

* * *

 

Of all the winters that Steve had lived through, none had been as bad as the winter of ’37, when he caught pneumonia and had been bedridden for two weeks.  Coughing, chattering hard enough that he worried he’d break his teeth, he’d been convinced he’d die surrounded by the darkness that came with the long Brooklyn winters, no matter what Bucky told him when he was checking on him in the evenings, the back of his hand pressed to Steve’s forehead to check him for fever.  (There was almost always a fever.)

“I’m gonna die here,” Steve had rasped, face flushed, eyes unnaturally lit up with the fever that he couldn’t seem to sweat out.  “I’m gonna die here, Buck, it ain’t a question anymore.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Bucky told him, hair in disarray from how many times he scraped it back out of his eyes with his fingers.  “Alright?  This ain’t gonna kill you, not on my watch.” 

He was sitting on the side of Steve’s bed, dressed down to his shirtsleeves and suspenders, and even though Steve’s head was aching enough to make him dizzy, he could still see the dark circles that were making homes underneath Bucky’s eyes.  There were always bruise-like shadows under Bucky’s eyes in the winter.  Steve slept fitfully through every night spent sick, but Bucky barely slept at all—he never said the words out loud, but Steve always suspected that Bucky stayed awake because he didn’t want to miss it if Steve’s rattling breaths stopped in the middle of the night.  Sometimes, when the nights were the coldest, Steve would wake in the night to discover that Bucky’s arms had appeared around his waist when he wasn’t paying attention, Bucky’s forehead tucked into the notch between the first two vertebrae of Steve’s spine.  His hot breath would fan over Steve’s crooked back, settling in the dips between his ribs, settling into his skin like it’d always lived there.

Steve would press his hand to his mouth so he wouldn’t make a sound.  There were parts of his body that never felt warm until Bucky was touching them, even when he blew on them, even when he rubbed his hands together to try and get a little more friction.  The winter was cold, Bucky was warm, and it was agony, being caught between the freezing cold and the hot press of Bucky’s mouth to the nape of his neck in sleep.

Now Steve doesn’t have pneumonia, but he still sleeps fitfully, still dreams fever dreams, and he still wonders if Bucky has those dark shadows under his eyes.  And if the purple-black watercolor paints still live under Bucky’s eyes, if he still looks like life had kicked his face twice, Steve needs to know when the winter will end—how many months they will have to spend like this, shivering to pieces in the anticipation-riddled hours before dawn, waiting, waiting to thaw.

 

* * *

 

It’s a pattern Steve couldn’t have anticipated, even if he’d known in advance that Bucky would live in his apartment like the last reverberation of an echo.  He gets up every morning with a weight pressing down on the space between his shoulder blades and checks the apartment for the pieces of evidence that Bucky has left behind him.  Sometimes he finds clues to Bucky’s existence, sometimes he doesn’t, but it always fills his heart with something sharp as shrapnel, and he always ends up with his pulse hammering out a beat that makes him fear for the integrity of the muscle of his heart.  There are signs of their cohabitation everywhere he looks.

He leaves things in the evenings and Bucky takes them, sometimes.  Bucky always takes the notes, peeling them up off of whatever surface Steve sticks them to and spirits them away somewhere.  (Steve likes to think of them lining Bucky’s pockets, so every time Bucky sticks his metal hand inside, it’s Steve’s words of love that warm his fingertips.)  He never gets anything back, but he doesn’t mind, he knows by now not to expect anything in return.  He likes to think that he isn’t any more disappointed than he ought to be.

They carry on like this for weeks.  Steve offers up everything he has, hands held palms up, reaching towards Bucky the way he never truly stopped reaching for him after the first moment Bucky fell out the side of the train.  He’s reaching for him, he has been reaching for him for seventy years, he has never once stopped reaching for him.  Bucky keeps taking his notes.  Steve keeps writing them, wondering with a sick sort of longing if this is Bucky, reaching back.

“Has he bugged the apartment?” Natasha wants to know, her hands carefully tucked into her black jeans pockets, shrewd eyes narrowed as she scans the windowsill, the edge of the sink, the ceiling tiles.

“What the hell, Nat,” Steve says, mildly indignant.  “Why would he bug the apartment?  He lives here, practically.”

“Well, speaking from personal experience,” she says, just sharp enough to bite, and sinks into a crouch to inspect the bottom shelf of Steve’s bookcase.  “He’ll want to have all the information available to him concerning his past.  He’s probably been listening to you talk about him this entire—ah ha.”  She emerges, victorious, a small metal chip pinched between forefinger and thumb.  She looks up at Steve, the _I told you so_ implicit in her gaze.  “He doesn’t want to be caught by surprise.  Can you blame him?”

“Christ,” Steve says, like it’s punched out of him.  He reaches down and takes the bug out of her hand, carefully sliding it back into place at the back of the bookshelf.  It sticks with a magnetic click, the kind that reminds Steve of Bucky’s arm, the metal plates whisper-smooth where the edges connect.  “I don’t blame him for _anything_.”

The look Natasha gives him, then, isn’t exactly kind—it isn’t exactly anything else, though, and it makes Steve a deep kind of uncomfortable that isn’t quite fair, really, when he thinks about it.  She can see all the way to the core of him.  She can see through him like there is not one part of him that is opaque.

“Who is he?” she asks.

Steve blinks.  “What?”

Natasha doesn’t answer, just tilts her head ever so slightly to the side.  Her hair is short now, almost a military crew cut, and it makes Steve wonder if she's someone new now, and if he ought to treat her differently for it.  “If you say he’s your old friend Bucky Barnes, that’ll tell me one thing,” she says eventually, quietly.  “If you say he’s an asset that needs to be brought in, that’ll tell me something else entirely.”

“He’s neither of those,” Steve says.  “Especially not—that second thing.”

Natasha’s face remains impassive.  “What is he, then?”

Steve is still crouched, knees aching a little with the stretch.  He’s never much liked staying in the same place for any extended period of time.  “He’s important,” he settles on at last, and stands with finality.  “And he’s my responsibility.”

Natasha stands as well, mirroring him, head still cocked to the side like she’s listening to a faraway sound that only she can hear.  “Interesting,” she says, and puts her fingers back inside her pockets.  Her hands appear deceptively fragile, but Steve has seen them snap bone, and he does not doubt with a single fiber of his being that she is fully prepared to do so again without hesitation.  “Let’s find the other bugs.”

She and Steve sweep the rest of the apartment.  They find two other metal chips, making the total count three.

 

* * *

 

Steve stirs awake at two in the morning—light sleeper, he’s always been a light sleeper—and it takes a moment for him to realize why he’s frozen in place, breath held suspended in his throat.  There is a person at his back.  The bedsprings don’t creak, but Steve can feel someone’s spine moving against his own with every breath they take. 

His heart, in his chest, is twisted up hard enough to make his hand tighten into a fist around the nearest handful of sheets.  He doesn’t make a sound.  He doesn’t breathe.  The shape at his back, spine resting against his spine, breathes quietly.  He wants so desperately to turn around, to turn on the light and look at Bucky’s face.  He has been picturing the soft way Bucky’s lips part at rest for so long that it makes him want to bite his tongue hard enough to bleed, hard enough to cut it in half, now that it is so close to him.  Bucky is at his back.  Bucky is breathing.

Steve doesn’t turn on the light.  He doesn’t turn around.  He feels Bucky’s spine against his own, he squeezes his eyes shut, and focuses on matching their breaths the way he used to when he was small and struggling and every breath had the potential to be his last.  He used to stay so very still, with Bucky’s arms circled around his waist, one warm, heavy hand resting over the slightly concave plane of his flat stomach.  Now, the only point of contact is at his back, one line of warmth running down his back parallel to his spine, but it feels so familiar that his teeth ache all the way down into his jaw.  When he closes his eyes, he can taste the thick heat of those sticky Brooklyn summers on his tongue, he can feel the wet press of Bucky’s half-parted lips to the nape of his neck. 

Steve stays like that, counting his heartbeats, listening to the slow, soft sound of Bucky breathing.  His mind is screaming the whole time.  Bucky’s breaths are entirely uniform, and Steve wonders if he’s really sleeping, or if his eyes are open and boring holes into the wall in front of him the way Steve is staring holes into the wall he’s facing.  Bucky’s breaths are too even.  Steve can’t stop listening to him breathing.

If there are words he’s meant to be saying, he doesn’t know what they are.  He lies there for hours, mouth shut, teeth and lips closed around a variety of syllables that he knows are mostly a jumble of Bucky’s name on repeat.  He is a broken record, when it comes to Bucky.  He is a broken record and the needle does not stop skipping, dragging over the same three thoughts that stick like flypaper in his head. 

It strikes him, then, that Bucky has not touched him since he dragged both their bodies out of the Potomac.  (“I think he was here,” Steve had told Sam, half crazed and filled with enough longing to make him choke.  His hospital memories are tinged with fever, blind and aching and burning alive through his skin.  He thinks of Bucky, now, and the hard angle of Bucky’s spine pressed against his own.  He knows now that burning is a better death than freezing.)  Bucky has not touched him since the Potomac, not since the rush of water down Steve’s throat, and now he’s here, and Steve has a hand white-knuckled and shaking around his fistful of sheets.

He doesn’t speak, doesn’t move, until the first rays of sunlight cut across his shoulder blade and slice into the wall he’s facing.  He lies as still as he is able, even when he feels Bucky begin to move at his back, even when he hears two nearly-silent feet hit the floor with sound muted by the carpet, but he can’t stand it, he has to turn around—

Steve rolls over just in time to catch a flash of metal as Bucky levers himself out the window.  The morning sunlight is dazzling when it glances off of Bucky’s left arm, splattering refractions of light that glitter like stolen pennies rolling across Steve’s bedroom floor.

 

* * *

 

 _You didn’t have to leave_ , Steve writes on a post-it note, but doesn’t stick it anywhere, just holds onto it while he paces the entirety of his apartment, back to front, aimless and aching deep in the pit of his stomach.  _You didn’t have to leave_ , it’s written on the page, and the words are pressed to the palm of his hand, but Bucky isn’t the one who should feel guilty for leaving, it’s Steve who didn’t stick around, it’s Steve who dropped him and didn’t pick up the pieces.  _You didn’t have to leave_.  The broken-glass glitter of the sun reflecting off Bucky’s arm is an image he can’t get out of his head. _You didn’t have to leave._

“Christ,” he hisses, leaning against the wall in his hallway, and doesn’t fight the urge to slide down the wall until he’s sitting, forehead touching his knees.  He can’t stop thinking about the snow, the whistling of the Alpine wind coming through the hole in the side of the train—and if it’s whistling in his ears, then by god, it must be _howling_ in Bucky’s—

 

* * *

 

Bucky doesn’t come that night.  Or the night after.  The spot at Steve’s back as he lies in bed has never felt cold before, but it does now, oh, his spine is freezing.  His back is ice.  He hasn’t felt this cold since his plane crashed into the water, he hasn’t tasted ice down his throat since then until this moment, tongue pressed to the roof of his mouth, frozen ocean pooling in the back of his throat.  Bucky doesn’t come back and Steve misses his presence greatly, though he suspects he shouldn’t be so surprised.  Bucky is a ghost.  Ghosts are often intangible.

But Steve felt his presence at his back, and he knows that he will not rest until he feels that steady heaviness of Bucky’s cold left arm against his shoulder blade.  Now that he has felt the solidity of Bucky’s skin through his thin t-shirt, he can’t stop thinking about the machine-gunfire patter of his heart in his chest when Bucky’s breaths rocked against his own ribcage with every inhalation.  He’s never been able to take his life in sips; now that he’s touched Bucky once he can’t stop thinking about touching him again: holding Bucky’s face between his two warm, broad palms, feeling Bucky’s heart hammering against his own, pressing his forehead to Bucky’s until their eyes are both clear of shadows.

Bucky doesn’t come that night.  Steve tries to be patient, but he’s never been patient once in his life, and the waiting (fist pressed to mouth, toes curled tight enough to hurt in his shoes) kills him a little.  There is very little he would not give to have the promise of Bucky’s return hovering in front of his fingertips.  He retreats to his bedroom in the evenings and does not know how to stop his heart from tremoring in his chest like there’s an earthquake shattering under his sternum, he does not understand how to calm the sparks in his belly before they ignite into a brush fire, he does not know how to hold himself still.  Perpetual motion, that’s the way he lives his life.  Perpetual motion.  Perpetual sound.  He does not know how to hold himself still.  He has never before had to learn.

 

* * *

 

“You know, I was a little worried things were gonna escalate when you told me my apartment might be bugged like yours,” Sam says, but he doesn’t sound particularly concerned as he hands Steve a plate to dry.  “It may not feel like it, but it’s actually not a bad sign.”  Steve dries the plate, watching Sam scrub out a stubborn pasta pot with dubious eyes.  Sam catches his look and sighs out a laugh, nudging Steve with his hip, and turns off the water.  “No, really, if he let you anywhere near his unprotected back, it means you’re making headway.  How long did it take you to let _anyone_ near your six when you got back, huh?”

“That’s a decent point,” Steve allows, and shelves the plate, slinging his damp dish towel over his shoulder.  “I just—where does he go during the day?  What does he do with himself?”

“What did you do with yourself?” Sam asks, head cocked, wet hands perched on his hips.

Steve scuffs a hand through his hair.  For the most part, when he got back, he fought an awful lot of relatively terrible people and hoped he’d die somewhere along the way.  He’d had nothing to lose, nothing he’d known he could lose, anyway, and throwing himself into the line of fire seemed a better option than doing anything about it himself.

“I got into trouble,” is all he says, shrugging a shoulder.  “You probably heard about it on the news.”

Sam nods thoughtfully, but the way the light hits his eyes makes Steve suspect he knows more than he’s letting on.  Steve ducks his head, smiles tightly at his feet, and lets the knowledge of what he did not say hang between them for a second—Sam turns on the water again, turns back to the half-clean pasta pot, and Steve picks up his dish rag once again, slowly strangling it in his hands.

 

* * *

 

For a moment, Steve is convinced his blood has turned to ice in his veins.  There is no other reason that explains the way his hand freezes around the doorknob when he gets it open, no other possible explanation for the way the hair on the back of his neck stands up like electricity is crackling in the air to warm him of an impending lightning strike.

There is a trail of muddy footprints leading down his hallway, and when he cocks his head to the side, Steve can hear the water running.  Cautiously, he picks his way down the hall and tries not to let his heartbeat rattle him to pieces—he leaves his groceries toppled over by the front door in a pile, an apple rolling across the hardwood floor with a low, ominous sound that puts Steve’s teeth on edge.  The bathroom door is half open.  Steve takes a deep breath, rapping his knuckles against the doorframe before he opens the door the rest of the way and looks inside.  He doesn't know what he's hoping to find.

Bucky is holding his right hand under the faucet, an ugly burn blooming red and furious over his pale, scarred skin. “Hey,” he says tightly, looking at Steve with an expression that Steve can’t read.  Steve's head is swimming.  There is something thick in his mouth, something that makes him clutch at the doorframe to keep himself standing.  Bucky’s hair is ragged and limp, there are dark hollows under his cold blue eyes, he is going to break Steve’s heart without saying a word, Steve can already tell.

“Hey,” he says, and it comes out strained.  Strangled.

“Sorry about the mess,” Bucky says, and Steve notices for the first time that there is mud caked down his legs from the knee down, smeared on his ragged black jeans, on the tops of his scuffed-up boots.  There’s a long tear down one pant leg.  A gash down his shin, blood dried and crusted over.  “I was gonna clean it up before you got home.”

“Jesus, Bucky,” Steve says, voice cracking.  “What’d you do, take on an army?”

Bucky’s arm is very still under the faucet.  His skin has gone pink from the cold water, but the red edge of the burn is still obvious where it splatters over his forearm like a pool of red paint.  “That’s more or less the idea,” he says, shoulders so taut that Steve wonders, for a moment, if the muscle between his shoulder blades might snap.  His eyes are so sharp, so blue when he drags his gaze up Steve’s body to meet his eyes. 

Steve can’t breathe.  For a moment—just a moment—he’s back in Brooklyn, gasping like a fish out of water in a hospital bed while Bucky clutches one small hand between his own.  He can taste smoke on the back of his tongue, he cannot cough the smoke out of the back of his throat—

The moment breaks when Bucky turns off the faucet.  Bucky reaches for a washcloth with his metal hand and carefully pats his burned arm dry.  “I heal fast,” he says when he catches Steve’s sick expression.  “It’s okay.”

Steve swallows tightly.  “How fast?”

Bucky’s head cocks to the side.  “Second degree burn, one hour.  Third degree burn, four to six hours,” he recites crisply.  “Hairline fracture, twelve hours.  Clean break, one to two days, minor lacerations from five to forty minutes, major lacerations from six hours to three days—"

“Stop,” Steve says with a choked-off sound.  Bucky cuts himself off immediately, mouth closing with a snap.  Steve has thought about the decades that Bucky spent in the belly of some HYDRA base, he’s thought about it every night since he ripped the mask off the Winter Soldier’s face and exposed Bucky’s to the light, he’s turned it around in his head over and over and over until it makes him sick.  How else would Bucky know the exact amount of time it would take him to heal from every conceivable injury unless HYDRA broke him on repeat?

Bucky doesn’t seem phased by his arm, but all his weight is on his uninjured leg, so Steve swallows back the taste of bile long enough to offer him a small, unhappy smile.  “D’you need some first aid for that leg?” he asks haltingly, and tries to reach for the medicine cabinet, but aborts the gesture when Bucky twitches away from his potential touch. 

Bucky glances down at his leg, looks up again, and shrugs.  “It’ll be fine if you leave it alone for a couple minutes.”

“I’ve got Batman band-aids,” Steve adds a little helplessly, desperation tasting like dread when it lands on his tongue.

Bucky looks at him blankly.  “What’s Batman?”

Steve opens his mouth, thinks better of it, and closes it again.  “Never mind,” he says, and stuffs his hands in his pockets so they don’t twitch.  “What else’s injured?”

Steve can see the calculations flickering behind Bucky’s open eyes.  It’s worlds away from the blank venom in the Winter Soldier’s gaze, and he hadn’t realized how frightened he’d been of seeing that look again until he’s getting something else entirely.  Bucky is far from an open book, so far from it, but Steve can see that there are, at least, words on the page.

“My pride, mostly,” Bucky says slowly, burned arm curled close to his chest.  Almost cradled.

“How fast does that heal?” Steve asks wryly.

“I’ll let you know when I find out,” Bucky answers, and smiles, a small, bitter thing that catches Steve somewhere between a wince and a choking laugh.

 

* * *

 

There is something distinctly surreal about having Bucky perched on the kitchen table, mismatched hands wrapped around a coffee mug, ankles crossed, tension twisting up and across every muscle in his back.  Steve leans against the counter, watching him and trying not to watch him.  Steve leans against the counter and does not know how to keep his heart inside his chest instead of bleeding through his ribs when it melts in Bucky’s presence.

“Where do you go during the day?” he asks, and tries not to be startled when he looks up and finds that Bucky is looking at him already.

“This is a pretty big city,” is all Bucky says.  “And you know what they say about big cities.”

Steve frowns slightly, watching the way Bucky sips at his mug, watching the way he swallows.  “What do they say?”

“That they’re full of rats,” Bucky says, with a surprising amount of venom.  Steve notices, for the first time, a dark smudge underneath Bucky’s left ear—it’s dark, and it’s red, and Steve feels his mouth go dry with fear in a rush so sudden it feels like he’s been doused in cold water.

“Hey,” he says carefully, though the tremor in his voice can’t be hidden with any degree of success.  “You wouldn’t take on HYDRA alone, would you?”

If Bucky flinches when HYDRA is named, he covers it so quickly that Steve can’t tell if it was just a twitch of his own imagination.  “Define alone,” Bucky says, a few long, straggly strands of hair falling onto his cheek when he tips his head to the side.

“Without backup,” Steve says, but he means _without me_.

Bucky drains his cup, eyes tipping closed in a way that Steve understands is meant to look casual, but could not be farther from it if he tried.  Neither of them are any good at playing casual anymore, not after so many years of wearing their hearts on their sleeves.

“This is good coffee,” Bucky says.  He doesn’t say anything else.

“D’you want some more?” Steve asks.

Bucky nods.  Steve pours.

 

* * *

 

Steve keeps breathing.  Bucky accepts a clean pair of pants, though he declines a new shirt, and disappears into the bathroom for a while to wash off his leg.  “Does the door lock?” he asks first, toeing off his shoes in the kitchen.  He looks smaller after his boots are off and he’s standing in his sock feet—a little smaller, a little more fragile, a little more real.

“Yeah,” Steve answers.  “But I can also sit outside and guard the door if you’d like that, too.”

Bucky looks simultaneously grateful and surprised.

This is how Steve finds himself leaning against the hallway wall, sitting cross-legged, hands folded neatly in his lap.  He stays quiet enough that he can hear it when Bucky locks the door behind himself, the sound of the running water, the sound of Bucky’s belt buckle and gun hitting the tiles with low, heavy thuds.  Steve guards the door with his shield at his side.  His hand is white-knuckled around one edge, back ramrod-straight.  He remembers the shivering, nauseating feeling of vulnerability that came with peeling his uniform off for the first time after he was thawed out and discharged by the SHIELD doctors.  He remembers the way he was always looking over his shoulder, he remembers the sick uncertainty, and if it was bad for him after being thrust into the future, then he can’t imagine how badly Bucky’s skin is crawling now.

The water turns off eventually, and Steve watches steam creep out from under the doorway until he hears the lock click and Bucky comes out, wearing the new pants, towel draped over his bare shoulders like a cape.  “Any chance I could still take you up on that shirt offer?” he asks, fingers tight where they’re curled around the edge of the towel, and looks down at Steve with something sheepish on his face, damp hair sticking to his neck.  Steve smiles up at him, though it is an unstable sort of smile, and stands with his fingers still wrapped around the edge of his shield.

“Absolutely,” he says.  “C’mere, I’ll get you something.”

Bucky follows him willingly enough, bare feet making muted sounds when they hit the carpet, and Steve leads him into his bedroom so he can put his shield down at the foot of his bed and retrieve a spare t-shirt out of his dresser.

“Thanks,” Bucky says, taking the shirt.  Steve averts his eyes when Bucky lets the towel drop to the floor.  He doesn’t look up until Bucky is scraping his hair back from his face and tying it back with a hair tie that he slides off his left wrist—Steve’s shirt is large on him, hanging off his shoulders, but Steve suspects that most things would look overlarge on him right now.  The razor-sharp cut of Bucky’s stomach (his collar bones, his cheekbones, the visible bones of his right wrist) gives him the uneasy look of a starved wolf—he is vicious, underneath Steve’s soft black t-shirt, he is vicious and Steve does not doubt for a moment that he will lash out with teeth bared the moment he feels threatened.

“D’you need anything else?” he asks, an ache flaring up in the pit of his stomach as he watches Bucky adjust the way his knife’s sheath lies on his thigh.  Bucky tucks a lock of hair behind his ear and looks up, eyes the same pale blue that they were the first day he looked down at Steve at eight years old with a gap-toothed grin and his cap shoved on his head backwards.  They’re sharper now.  Sharp the way shrapnel is sharp, the way razors are sharp.

“I’m going to track down every HYDRA agent that’s left,” Bucky says, buckling his gun deftly to his belt.  “And then I’m going to kill them.”

“Oh,” Steve says. 

“Come with me?” Bucky asks, dangerous hands tucked into his pockets.

(“Are you ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?” Steve had asked, back when he thought he understood what pain was, back when he thought he had suffered more than he was ever going to suffer in his life.  Now Bucky is asking him the same question and Steve knows what answer he’ll give before he even considers opening his mouth.)

“Let me pack a bag,” Steve says, and he hears that wind in his ears again, that howling winter wind, the icy scream of train brakes squealing along the tracks.

Bucky nods, metal fingertips picking absently at the hem of his borrowed shirt.  “I need more ammo.”

“I can get you ammo,” Steve says, thinking about Tony, and the passcode he has to Tony’s lab.  “Do you need a new gun?”

Bucky’s hand twitches toward where his gun is holstered at his side.  “No,” he answers, and when the pad of his thumb slides over the barrel of the gun, it is as gentle, Steve thinks, as a caress.  “I just need you.”

It’s said in the same flat tone of voice that he’s used the entire time he’s been standing like a shadow in Steve’s doorway, but no matter how emotionlessly it’s said, no matter how matter-of-fact Bucky is with the heel of his hand resting on the butt of his gun, it guts Steve all the same.  He breathes, carefully, around the sharp thing that is living in his throat.  He breathes, and he looks at Bucky, who looks back at him with an expression that he does not recognize, but loves it fiercely just the same.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he says, and does not reach for Bucky, though his hand wants to meet Bucky’s cheek.  _I need you, too,_ he does not say, but it is implicit in his gaze.

Bucky wets his teeth with the tip of his tongue, thinking.  “It’s good that you’re coming with me,” he says finally.  “I won’t have to hotwire a car.”

Steve’s heart skips a beat.  “Yeah, no, hotwiring a car isn’t a great plan,” he says, slightly strangled.  “Especially if we don’t actually want to be followed.”

There is a ghost of a smile on Bucky’s face, though, and Steve does not know what he did to put it there, but he thinks he’d like to figure it out so he can do it again and again until the creases at the corners of Bucky’s mouth are smoothed out into laughter lines. 

“What’re you waiting for, Rogers?” Bucky says, raking his fringe out of his eyes with his metal hand.  “Get a move on.  I want to hit a base in Jersey tonight.”

Steve knows there are things he’ll need to do—call Natasha and Sam, probably talk Tony down from a cliff when he hears that Steve’s gone on a revenge road trip, deal with the responsibilities he’ll be leaving behind—but for now, just for now.  With his shirt on Bucky’s body, with his head buzzing from hearing his name pass Bucky’s lips after so many years of silence—now, just for now, he and Bucky are the only two people alive in the world.

 

* * *

 

PART TWO

 

* * *

 

Bucky’s heels are kicked up on the dashboard, eyes half lidded, but Steve thinks that he’s just a little too sharp these days to give off the appearance of ease that he’s attempting to radiate out from his body.  Steve knows the feeling—it’s hard to feel casual without sinking his teeth into casualties sometimes.

He keeps his hands from clenching around the steering wheel and watches the road lights flicker over Bucky’s face out of the corners of his eyes, watching the orange shards splinter when they hit Bucky’s lower lip.  Strange, how Bucky’s hair almost seems to be black until the light catches it and reveals it to be brown.

“Eyes on the road, Rogers,” Bucky says softly, lazily, and lets his left hand fall from where it’s curled in his lap to where Steve’s is resting on the stick shift.  He curls his pinkie finger, cold and alive, around Steve’s—Steve has felt that cold hand tight around his throat, fist hard when it crushes his cheekbone, he has felt it hurt him so many times that it startles him, feeling it be so gentle where it curls around his littlest finger.

“We’ll hit Jersey before it gets too late,” he says, letting his finger tighten around Bucky’s to let him know he’s welcome to stay there.  He looks back to the road with some difficulty—tearing his eyes away from the edge of Bucky’s jaw takes effort.  He doesn’t want to look away. 

“Night cover will be good,” Bucky says, voice sleep-thick, and when Steve chances a glance in his direction, he sees that those ice-blue eyes have drifted closed.  “’M best in the dark.”

Steve worries his lower lip between his teeth, thinking, listening to the crackle and hum of the radio between songs.  The low rumble of the engine is a quiet counterpoint to the mess of white noise in his head, flickering like a candle flame, licking at the darker corners of his mind.  “I like you better in the light,” he says softly, after a moment, but Bucky, with his eyes closed, breathes the deep, easy breaths of the sleeping. 

Steve holds his metal hand carefully.  He’ll tell it to him again in the morning, if he gets the opportunity.

 

* * *

 

Steve wakes Bucky when they reach the New Jersey state line.  Steve’s hand touches his shoulder and Bucky is alert immediately, eyes snapping open, right hand flailing until it can wrap around the handle of the knife in his boot and wrenching it upward before Steve can say a word.  Steve’s heart skips a beat, eyes wide when he feels the cold flat of Bucky’s blade pressing against the skin of his throat.  Bucky is breathing heavily.  Steve’s breath is frozen in his throat.

“Sorry,” he says, and feels the edge of the knife dig into his skin a little when he swallows convulsively. 

Bucky wordlessly takes the knife back, and Steve finally feels prepared to lean back from where he’s hovering over Bucky’s body.  He raises his fingertips to his throat, feeling the slight indentation where the knife bit into his skin—there’s no blood, but the look on Bucky’s face is devastated enough that Steve supposes it’s the principle of the thing more than the mark that matters.

“Gotta be careful,” Bucky says, voice low and rough.  His right hand, just as cold as his left, comes up to just barely brush over the red line on Steve’s neck.  “I sleep lightly.”

“Noted,” Steve says, trying to resist the urge to lean into the palm of Bucky’s hand.

 

* * *

 

Bucky ties his hair back before they enter the HYDRA base.  Steve is leaning against the wall, shield on his arm, a gun designed by Tony in his free hand.  His forefinger lies down the barrel of the gun, but it twitches toward the trigger like it’s drawn there by magnetic force.  He’s impatient, now that he knows there are breathing bodies on the other side of this door that have done Bucky wrong; there are pulses beating that he would like to stop if he can, he would like to make the tiles run red until his own hands feel a little less useless at his sides.  Bucky, hair scraped back from his face, blue eyes piercing as they cut to meet Steve’s gaze, nods once.  Steve takes this as invitation to push himself off the wall and take a step back, hissing a breath through his teeth as he kicks the door in with a crash like a thunderclap.

This is not, he reminds himself, a stealth mission.

There is a startled scientist in a white lab coat at the other end of the hall.  He catches sight of Bucky—feral, teeth bared—and bolts, lab coat tails flying out behind him like streamers.  Bucky, a gun in one hand, knife in the other, does not hesitate to follow; he leaps into motion in a graceful arc that makes Steve’s mouth run dry before he shakes his head to clear it and tears after him.  His boot heels strike the ground with audible sounds.  His heart, however, is louder in his ears.

Bucky rounds the corner before he does.  Steve hears a guttural cry, followed quickly by a scream that bubbles off into something wet and that he recognizes with a bone-deep revulsion.  When he makes it to the end of the hallway, he doesn’t know what he expects to find, but it is not this: Bucky, pale hands covered in blood, a body slumped over at his feet with gouge marks matching up to Bucky’s fingertips in a line all the way down its throat.  Bucky, when he turns, has a streak of blood that goes from his temple all the way to the curve of his neck.  Steve, with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, supposes he’s just glad that the blood isn’t Bucky’s.

“One down,” Bucky says, and grins.

 

* * *

 

They clear out the base with a steadiness that is not precise, but nor is it erratic—Steve follows Bucky wherever he leads, trailing after the predator that is living inside Bucky’s skin, the one that curls Bucky’s fingers into claws and his footsteps into the silent tread of the living dead.  They are wolves here, a pack of two, and Steve feels the feral gratitude burn down his throat with every breath.  He is not complaining.  He has been chained to SHIELD for so long that it feels a little like freedom to stalk the halls of this HYDRA base, a little like freedom, a little like fear.  Terror.  He’s glad the terror isn’t his this time.

Bucky seems to be aiming for the scientists, so Steve throws himself at the soldiers, the guards—it’s almost like old times, him and Bucky fighting HYDRA back to back, though the way that they fight has changed drastically.  There’s no shoot to injure, now, no prisoners to be taken, they aim for the jugular and carotid arteries.  Bucky still has his six, though, and Steve remembers how to dodge when Bucky whips his pistol up and around, metal wrist just barely grazing Steve’s ear when he reaches over Steve’s shoulder to drop an agent that gets a little too close for comfort.  They dodge.  They weave.  They tap into the muscle memory that blooms between them, familiar, the same fight that they have been fighting since the first time Bucky picked Steve up out of the dirt by the collar.  They are still fighting the same fight.  Steve feels Bucky’s back against his back and when he makes eye contact with a HYDRA scientist across the room from him, he bares his teeth in a snarl.

He gets knocked down by one of the larger guards, a kick to the back of his knees sending him flat on his back.  The air is knocked out of him as well, but before he can take a knee to the chest or a bullet to the gut, Bucky is hauling the soldier off of him and throwing him into the wall, metal arm shoved up to his throat to pin him there two inches off the ground. 

“Asset, stand down—” the soldier chokes out, and Bucky makes an agonized sound that Steve has never heard before in his life and breaks the man’s neck with an audible crunch.  When he removes his arm, the body slides down the wall to crumple in a heap on the floor.

Steve picks himself up, struggling to his feet just in time to lunge and grab the arm of the last scientist that had turned to flee.  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he demands, hand tightening around the man’s bicep, eyeing the glasses perched on his nose—one lens cracked—with disgust.

“I—I had nothing to do with this,” the scientist tries, tugging weakly at his arm in a feeble attempt to get out of Steve’s grasp.  “You have to believe me, I’m just—I’m sorry, about your friend—”  A panicked look, then, in Bucky’s direction.  “—But I wasn’t part of that, I swear to you, I’m not even a biologist—”

There’s a loud crack, and half of the scientist’s head explodes in a spray of blood and bits of skull.  Steve recoils, dropping him, and looks at Bucky, whose face is deceptively smooth.

“He was telling the truth,” Bucky says, lowering his gun.  “He wasn’t a biologist.  He was a psychologist.”

Steve gapes at him, eyes wide.

“This way,” Bucky says as he turns to the door, leaving Steve to gaze, blinking, at the room that they painted red.  Satisfied that no one but him is breathing, he steps over the bodies to follow Bucky out the door and into a dark hallway, lit only by two flickering overhead LED lights.  Bucky slides his gun into its holster, so Steve puts his shield on his back and focuses on the back of Bucky’s head as they make their way down the hall, eyes caught on the twist of Bucky’s ponytail that swathes down his neck in a ripple.

“Where are we going?” he asks.  Bucky doesn’t answer, but he walks with a confidence that says enough, in its own way.  He knows where he’s going.  For the first time, Steve thinks, why Jersey?  Why this base in particular?  Why here, why now, why these scientists?

Bucky shoulders open a door at the end of the hall with a grim expression that Steve can’t categorize with any degree of success, so he doesn’t try.  He just follows.

“Oh, god,” he breathes, when Bucky slips inside and he can see past the doorway.  There is a single chair in the middle of the room, restraints open and waiting like bear traps attached to the arms, a tray with a mouth guard and a screwdriver sitting on a little table to the side.  The chair in DC, the one hidden deep underground SHIELD headquarters, had been uprooted under Steve’s supervision.  Now, with Bucky standing in the middle of the room, motionless, arms stiff at his sides, Steve realizes how fruitless his efforts thus far have been: there will always be another chair, another torture chamber, another set of steel instruments for peeling up layers of skin as long as HYDRA can sit in the shadows, licking its wounds and preparing to strike again.

With a cry, Bucky snaps out of his motionless state and throws himself at the chair, ripping off the head rest with his metal hand.  Steve watches from the sidelines, nauseous, as Bucky tears the chair apart with his bare hands, slashing into it with an animal snarl ripping out of his throat with every piece that he tosses aside.  When he’s done, he looks up at Steve, panting, and holds out his right hand.

“Need that extra ammo now,” he demands hoarsely, and snatches the spare cartridge from Steve’s hand the moment it’s offered so he can shove it roughly into place and fire at the wreckage, shot after shot, until his gun clicks, a low, hollow sound when he’s out of bullets.  Bucky stands there, smoking gun held suspended in front of him, eyes bright with an inner light that Steve has only seen burning in animals’ eyes.  Glinting off wolves’ teeth. 

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Bucky rasps.

“Okay, Buck,” Steve says softly, and does not touch him until they’ve walked back through the carnage they left in their wake, he does not touch him until they emerge into the first rays of sunlight that cut through cloud cover.  He does not touch him until Bucky reaches for him, blindly, flailing an arm in Steve’s general direction until his fingertips catch on Steve’s uniform.  He tucks his bloody face into the equally bloody crook of Steve’s neck, warm breath prickling over Steve’s jaw.  “Wanna head home?” Steve asks, pressing his cheek to the crown of Bucky’s dark head.

“No motel is ever gonna be home, pal,” Bucky says, voice muffled by Steve’s throat.  “’Specially not one in Jersey.”

“Alright,” Steve laughs, though it wavers, and lets Bucky clutch at the back of his jacket.  “Wanna head to the nearest shithole motel in this shithole state and crash for a couple hours, then?”

Bucky takes a deep, shaky breath that Steve can feel against his neck.  “Only if you promise to buy me a fuckton of shitty diner eggs.”

“Deal,” Steve says.

 

* * *

 

The hotel really isn’t all that shitty, Steve thinks, as he gets the room keys from the concierge and does his best to be subtle about the way he watches Bucky out of the corners of his eyes.  He cleaned himself up as best he could in the car with a couple tissues and the last two mouthfuls of water left in the plastic water bottle they’d gotten on their last stop, but he knows they make a hell of a pair, the two of them, bruised and a little bloody and carefully pretending they aren’t both keeping an eye on each other.  He’s grateful that the concierge doesn’t ask any questions, though he could do without the up-and-down look he gives Bucky when he hands over the room keys.

Bucky has his hood up, hands stuffed in his pockets, trying to slouch his way into oblivion like the world’s oldest, surliest teenager.  It’s oddly endearing, and Steve only just barely manages to keep the smile from breaking across his face through sheer force of will.

“What’s got you looking like such a goddamn goof?” Bucky asks, shouldering his bag as he and Steve make their way down the hallway toward their room.

“Nothing in particular.  Guess I’m just a goof by nature,” Steve answers blithely, unlocking the door and gesturing Bucky inside.  He flips the housekeeping sign to _do not disturb_ before he shuts the door behind him.  There are two small beds inside, separated by six feet of empty space that Steve doesn’t particularly care for.  (That recurring memory haunts him: Bucky, curled up behind Steve in the bed that they refused to acknowledge they shared, mouth pressed to the nape of Steve’s neck, one hand resting over one of Steve’s hip bones.  Why this memory, Steve doesn’t know; there are a thousand memories that could potentially split him open, but it’s this one that rests in the pit of his stomach, this one that digs into his body from the inside out.)  “Which bed d’you want?”

Bucky heads immediately for the bed tucked into the corner of the room, where he can have eyes on both the window and the door if he so chooses.  Steve is singularly unsurprised.

“Go take the first turn in the bathroom,” Bucky says, sitting gingerly on the edge of the bed so he can take off his boots.  “You smell like a goddamn crime scene.”

“You’re one to talk,” Steve says, but he heads for the bathroom anyway.

 

* * *

 

Once Steve finishes washing up, he rests his forehead against the cracked motel mirror and listens to the sound of Bucky moving around their room, closing the dark curtains to keep the sunlight out, checking the perimeter.  Steve knows what sweeping a room sounds like, and that’s what Bucky’s doing, crouching down to check underneath every piece of furniture, swearing softly when he accidentally knocks his foot into an unexpected ottoman.  Steve rests his forehead on the damp glass and listens to Bucky moving, to Bucky breathing, to the sounds of Bucky being alive in the next room over.

“Your turn,” Steve calls out when the room goes silent and he runs out of excuses to hide in the steam.  He wraps a towel around his waist and opens the door, wrinkling his nose when the cold air hits his body.

“About time,” Bucky says, peering reproachfully around the door frame.  “What are you, a fucking mermaid?”

 

* * *

 

Steve sleeps fitfully, but it’s Bucky that ends up crying out into the dark. 

Steve’s eyes snap open, alert immediately—years of being in the military have trained his body to switch on and off without more than a heartbeat’s hesitation.  He sleeps lightly.  He does not ever relax completely.  He remembers what happened last time he tried to wake Bucky by touching him, so he shoves the covers off his legs and pads across the six feet between their beds and sits, just sits.  He does not smooth his hand over Bucky’s bicep.  He does not stroke the sweaty hair out of Bucky’s eyes where it’s stuck to Bucky’s forehead.

“Hey, Bucky, hey,” he says softly.  “You’re dreaming, pal.  Wake up.”

Steve can pinpoint the moment when Bucky wakes up.  Bucky goes stiff, body language flipping from limp and traumatized to something else altogether—he’s wrapping his fingers around the handle of his knife under his pillow, his open eyes are completely blank, and Steve wisely chooses not to move, though his heart is starting to pick up the pace in his chest.  When faced with a fight or flight scenario, Steve has always been the kind to fight, always ready to jump in with his fingernails biting into his palms when he clenches his fists too hard.  He does not know how to hold himself still.

“Buck, it’s me,” he says again, voice breaking on the last syllable.  “It’s me, it’s your Steve.  I’m not gonna touch you, you don’t have to worry.”

“Steve,” Bucky repeats dumbly, uncomprehending.  He’s sitting up now, at least, tangled hair falling every which way, the whole of him looking rumpled and out of place in Steve’s overlarge t-shirt.  His right hand, the one with the knife, trembles until he can’t keep his hold on the handle and lets it drop to the floor.  (It sticks the landing, point embedded in the cheap floorboards.  Steve wonders if he ought to be more surprised by this.)  “Steve,” Bucky says again, with more urgency, eyes snapping up to meet Steve’s.

“Hey, hey,” Steve says again before he’s got an armful of Bucky, feeling Bucky’s fingers curl into claws over his shoulder blades, feeling the sharp gasps for breath against his throat.

Bucky mutters something in Russian and shakes, just shakes.  Steve holds him, and lets go when Bucky pulls back, and does not follow when Bucky scrambles to his feet and throws himself out the door to stand on the balcony.  Well, he waits for four and a half minutes until the worry is too much for him, and then he gets up from Bucky’s bed—sheets still warm—and quietly walks out to the balcony so he can join the sunset-bathed profile of Bucky’s face.

“Looks like we accidentally turned nocturnal,” Bucky says, looking out at the city sprawling beneath them, elbows resting on the balcony railing.  “Don’t suppose you have a smoke I could bum off you.”

“Sorry,” Steve says, and closes the sliding glass door behind him.

“Figures,” Bucky sighs, and squints a little as he looks down at the cars caught in traffic down below.

“Did you know that cigarettes are bad for you now?” Steve asks.  “Apparently those asthma cigarettes only fucked my lungs up more than they already were.”

Bucky huffs a sound that isn’t entirely dissimilar to a laugh.  “And to think, I spent my hard-earned pennies on fucking up your immune system _more_ ,” he says wryly, shaking his head.  “Which I didn’t think was possible, for the record.”

Steve laughs, ducking his head, and watches Bucky’s hair get blown gently to one side by the wind.  Bucky tucks a lock of hair behind his ear, but it falls out again, so Steve reaches over and fixes it for him, careful when his fingertips brush over the edge of Bucky’s jaw.  Bucky is so still under the pad of his thumb.  He’s so still that the breath he exhales when Steve draws back—unsteady, Steve notes, shaky all the way through his shoulders—makes him look as if he’s just come to life.

“Did you take a body count back in the HYDRA base?” Bucky asks, eyes still stuck on the road below them.  “I got—distracted.”

“Me too,” Steve says, looking at Bucky.  “Arithmetic was the last thing on my mind.”

Bucky leans his elbows on the railing again, but this time his head hangs between them, forehead coming to rest on one of his forearms.  “Shit,” he says.  “Shit.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees.  They don’t go back inside for a long while.

 

* * *

 

They pack up quickly and leave the hotel with uneasiness still creeping down the backs of their necks.  Or, at least, Steve assumes that the feeling is shared—Bucky looks just as tense as he feels, and the two of them don’t speak as they make their way to the parking lot.  Bucky’s got his hood up again.  Steve hitches his bag a little higher on his shoulder.

“I looked up directions to a diner while you were brushing your teeth,” Steve says, once they’re inside the car and he can look out the windshield while he’s talking instead of feeling obligated to try and meet Bucky’s gaze.  “We need to refuel before we hit another base.”

“If you say so,” Bucky says, feet kicked up on the dash.  Steve can feel the sharpness of his blue eyes scrape over his throat, but he doesn’t look over, because if he looks over now, he will not be able to look away.  He knows his limitations.  He keeps his eyes on the road.  “I don’t have to eat all that often,” Bucky adds, and it isn’t the fact of it that matters all that much—Steve has to eat frequently because of his increased metabolism, but he understands that different serums affect different bodies in different ways—but it’s the way Bucky says it, unworried, matter-of-fact, that digs under his skin a little.

“Eating is sort of necessary for human life,” Steve says, risking a glance in the rear-view mirror.  Bucky’s face is completely blank.

“Is that what I am,” Bucky says flatly, and looks out his window, effectively putting an end to the conversation.

 

* * *

 

The diner isn’t particularly impressive, but then again, it doesn’t need to be.  It’s open at midnight, breakfast served all day, and even with the flickering neon sign outside, that’s enough to convince Steve to open the door.  Bucky immediately zeroes in on a booth in the corner—window on his right side, back to the wall, door at his twelve—and leaves Steve to grab the menus and smile tightly at the waitress.  Steve doesn’t mention Bucky’s obvious preference for easily defendable positions; he scans for the exits every time he enters a room too, he knows what it’s like to feel uneasy until his back is to a wall.

“I can make good on that egg promise now,” he says, smiling, and hands Bucky a menu.  Bucky, visibly forcing his shoulders to relax, smiles back ever so slightly.

“Never let it be said you aren’t a man of your word,” he says, and flips the menu open, seemingly absorbed, but Steve knows that he’s straining to listen for the approaching patter of boots to the ground.  Steve knows this because he is doing it as well.

They get coffee and eggs and some unappetizing hash browns that Steve pokes at for a little while before pushing them at Bucky.  Bucky, to both of their surprise, _loves_ hash browns—Steve watches the pleasant surprise unfurl over his face, as well as the subtle way Bucky tries to eat slowly in an attempt to keep his unexpected enjoyment to himself.  Steve leans back in his seat, sipping at the dregs of his coffee, and when the waitress comes around to refill his cup, he smiles at her and orders Bucky another plate.  Bucky watches him with disbelieving eyes.

“Where’re we heading next?” Steve asks, once the waitress has disappeared, leaving their coffee cups full once more and their empty plates cleared.  Bucky is still watching him like he doesn’t know exactly what he’s looking at, so Steve clears his throat, reaching for his coffee cup in an attempt to break Bucky’s unblinking gaze.

It works.  Bucky shakes his head slightly and digs around in his jacket pocket until he produces a worn-down map of the country—he opens it up from where it’s been folded over several times until he can spread it down flat on the table-top.  Cities are circled in red sharpie all across the country.  “Take your pick,” he says, and pushes the map toward Steve with two fingertips.  “I don’t care.”

Steve turns the map around and studies it, frowning slightly, tracing a path that connects red circle to red circle all the way across the country.  “What do the asterisks mean?”

Bucky leans forward a little.  One lock of dark hair falls forward, and they’re close enough with their heads bowed together over the map that it hits Steve’s forehead while Bucky is squinting down at the paper. 

“Those’re the big bases,” he says, and points to one based in the middle of NYC.  “The ones that’re more than a one or two man job.  We can’t take them out on our own.”

Steve can feel it when Bucky hisses a breath through his teeth.  He stays very still, in case movement will prompt Bucky to pull back; the proximity kills him, a little, but he can’t help it if he wants to take whatever closeness Bucky is willing to give him, he can’t help it if Bucky’s breath hitting his cheek makes the low whine of winter wind whistle hollowly in his ears.

“I’ve got friends,” he says, and wets his lips with the tip of his tongue.  “That we can call.  To help.”

Bucky doesn’t immediately say no, which Steve takes as a good sign.  “I know who they are,” he says reluctantly, mouth twisted up.  “I was briefed.”  Bucky is always a little reticent to give up information, a little predisposed to play his cards close to his chest.  Steve can’t blame him.

“Then you know that they’re a good team,” Steve says, looking down at the map, down at the outline of NYC, and Bucky’s metal fingers glittering under the orange streetlamp light coming in through the diner window.  “And they’d help me if I asked.”

“Yeah, they’d help you,” Bucky says, and scrapes a hand through his hair.  “But how about me, huh?  Something tells me Captain America doesn’t go on a whole lot of revenge missions.”

When Steve swallows, it tastes a little like bile, a lot like shame.  “I think you’d be surprised,” he says, quietly, with a surprising amount of vehemence.  “How much revenge Steve Rogers needs.”  Bucky is still looking at him dubiously, so Steve curls his hand around Bucky’s metal fingers, holding his hand tightly before he loses his nerve.  “Forget Cap,” he says, low and serious and earnest, so earnest while he’s holding Bucky’s hand and his gaze as best he can.  “Fuck Cap.  Alright?  Cap’s not here right now, I left him in DC.”

That’s when the waitress arrives with Bucky’s second plate of hash browns.  Steve lets go of Bucky’s hand quickly, leaning back and pulling the map with him so the plate can be set in front of Bucky unobstructed.  Bucky’s eyes are glued to it, though, so after the waitress leaves again—with a curious look at Bucky’s hand that only makes Bucky sink further into his hood—Steve folds it back up and hands it to Bucky so it can disappear back into his jacket pocket where it belongs.

“Thanks,” Bucky says, reaching for his fork.  What for, though, Steve isn’t sure.  He hopes it isn’t just for the damn potatoes.

“You’re welcome,” Steve says, and watches the sharp, careful motions of Bucky eating.  Then, after a few moments of silence, he sighs, taking his phone out to bite the bullet and text Natasha.

 

* * *

 

They’re driving to another base a couple hours away, Bucky slouching so far his head isn’t even on the head rest anymore, Steve with all the tension in his body held tightly in his shoulders.  He keeps hoping Bucky will reach over and take his hand that’s lingering on the stick shift, but Bucky doesn’t touch him, Bucky is wandering somewhere in his head that does not involve Steve.  The space between them is a yawning chasm.  Steve keeps thinking Bucky might breach it, but he doesn’t, so it remains an empty space untraversed.

Silent, the dark, except for the rare sound of a car passing them on the highway.  Silent, Steve’s mouth, but his heart is screaming as he listens to the sound of engine rumbling.  To the sound of Bucky breathing in the dark.

 

* * *

 

With the concrete wall to his back, Steve’s heart is beginning to race.  They’ve done this before, so Steve knows what to expect, but that also means that he knows just how much blood is going to slide between his fingers, and the thought makes adrenaline flood his veins.  He wants to kill.  He wants to make the HYDRA agents inside choke on their own spines.  Bucky, counting his bullets, looks just as deadly as Steve feels.

“Nervous?” Bucky asks, sticking his gun in its holster for a moment so he can tie back his hair.

“Hell, no.”  Steve flexes his arm, feels his shield shift into a better grip.  “I’ve been ready for this for months.”

Bucky looks at him then with enough fondness to make Steve’s mouth go dry, to make his pounding heart ache in his chest.  He never really thought he would get that again, if he’s going to be honest with himself, and to see it here, now—

“Stay still,” Bucky instructs, and Steve frowns slightly, about to ask why, but then Bucky is pushing off the concrete wall and crossing over to him, mismatched hands coming up to cradle Steve’s face between them.  Steve doesn’t move.  He doesn’t breathe.  He watches Bucky, wide-eyed and uncomprehending, until Bucky’s breathes, “For luck,” and presses their mouths together.  Steve’s entire mind goes blank. 

It’s a clumsy kiss.  It’s barely even a kiss at all; Bucky shoves up onto the balls of his feet and presses his lips to the corner of Steve’s mouth, and then he falls back again, hands slipping into his pockets like it doesn’t matter, what he’s done, like it’s normal.  Like he’s kissed Steve a thousand times before.

“What,” Steve says, but it comes out too rough, so he swallows and tries again.  “What.  Was that.”

Buck tilts his head to the side.  “Don’t we do that?  Isn’t that something we do?”

“No,” Steve answers, eyes snagged on the smooth curve of Bucky’s lower lip.  “No, it’s not—we don’t do that.  We’ve never done that.”

It isn’t like it hasn’t crossed his mind once or twice, especially back when he was small and taking up space in Bucky’s apartment.  With Bucky coming home dazzled and smudged with lipstick some nights, with Bucky’s tendency to wander around the apartment half-naked during the summer, it was impossible for Steve to keep his thoughts from straying every now and again.  But then there was—Peggy, and then there was the war, and HYDRA, and then Bucky was falling, and.  Well.  Steve hasn’t let himself give it much thought.

“Oh,” Bucky says.  “Sorry.” 

Steve looks away with something foreign prickling down the back of his neck.  “Are we going to…?”  He nods his head in the direction of the steel door to the base.

“Go,” Bucky says.  Something that was bright in his eyes is now shuttered, wrapped in layers again and shoved away where Steve can’t see it.  They’ll talk about it after, and maybe Steve will hold Bucky as close as he is able and press kisses to every inch of pale skin from his forehead to his collar bones, but for now, while there is a mission to do—now, with revenge just behind the door in front of them—he can’t be distracted.  (Bucky’s mouth, a thin slash of displeasure and feral anticipation that cuts into his face, proves to be very distracting.  Steve looks away.)

“Three, two, one—” Steve says, then he kicks the door open, and the gaping maw of the HYDRA base opens up to swallow them.

 

* * *

 

This base is different from the last one.  There are fewer scientists inside, and more winding hallways to wander down that end up leading to nowhere.  The doors have little windows at the top, and after peering in one or two, Steve feels sick enough that he lets Bucky do the looking.  (Corpses, in one.  Two of them.  They lie, still and quiet, with their hands arranged neatly at their sides.  Steve would wonder what HYDRA is testing for, but he already knows it—the secret locked inside his veins is one that HYDRA will never stop trying to pick undone, Zola’s great regret, the last thread that keeps peace suspended over the sharp HYDRA spikes.)

Bucky raises a fist, signaling Steve to stop in front of one of the doors.  He shows Steve two fingers, pauses, then four.  Twenty-four hostiles.  Steve nods, and does not look at his own hands, made broad and strong enough to break bone.  Steve nods, and does not look at the curve of Bucky’s mouth, does not let himself look at the way Bucky’s teeth flash when they scrape over his lower lip.  (That mouth _touched_ his mouth, those lips were on his own not even fifteen minutes ago, Bucky took his face between his palms and kissed him—)

 _Ready?_ Bucky mouths.  Steve squares his shoulders, squares his jaw, and says out loud, “Ready.”

 

* * *

 

Steve and Bucky, back to back, taking the lives that tried to steal theirs.  Steve and Bucky, like old times, except they aren’t in a back alley anymore.  Steve wonders sometimes if he should have taken Bucky’s advice all those years ago and stayed in the crook of Brooklyn’s arm where there were no bullets to dodge, no mad scientists to take down, no world to be saved with nothing but his teeth and his fingers curled into claws.  But then, if Steve had stayed behind, he would’ve gotten one of those awful telegrams one evening— _we’re sorry to inform you that Sergeant James Barnes has fallen behind enemy lines_ —and he would not have been close enough to haul Bucky out of that HYDRA base against direct orders.

Steve looks at Bucky now, standing in the middle of the room, both guns in his hands at his sides.  Steve’s jaw aches where he failed to duck a punch, and he massages it, wincing, while Bucky bends to retrieve a knife that is stuck in a HYDRA agent’s throat.  He looks at Bucky and he thinks it might be enough, if he can have the opportunity to save Bucky again and again, if he can make up for all the times when he was not able to do so.  _I owe you_ , Natasha had told him months ago, and Steve had brushed it off at the time, but he understands now a little more what she was getting at.  He looks at Bucky and thinks _I owe you_ , he thinks there is very little he would not do to make up for failing to reach his hand.  For failing to return to Bucky’s icy grave and look for a body.

“Do you want to leave?”  Steve asks while Bucky is cleaning his knife on the hem of his shirt.  “Or is there something more we have to do?”  Tactfully, he doesn’t ask if there’s another chair that Bucky needs to tear to shreds, but he knows that Bucky doesn’t need to be told to hear what he’s thinking.  There’s a comfort in that, but there’s also regret—he and Bucky have always known each other’s heads inside and out, but it’s different now, it’s different, and Steve only understands the unspoken words that lie between them when the words are about people that they need to be killing.

“There are probably more scientists on the next floor down,” Bucky says, and does not meet Steve’s eyes.  He sheathes his knife, moving to reload his gun with practiced ease.

“Let’s go, then,” Steve says.  “Before they all escape.”

 

* * *

 

There are, in fact, more scientists in the floor below.  And the floor below that.  They find more bodies as well, in various stages of experimentation—Bucky checks each one for a pulse, two fingers of his right hand under each jaw, ear held suspended for a moment over every pair of grey lips to check for breath.  None of them are alive.  Steve can’t tell if Bucky is relieved or disappointed by this discovery.

“We caught them before they could clean up,” Bucky says, startling Steve out of his thoughts.  “They didn’t know we were coming.  That’s not something we’re gonna be able to rely on for very much longer.”

“Didn’t know they were still doing these kinds of experiments,” Steve says, swallowing a little roughly as he looks down at a woman with metal plating down her throat, down her chest.  “It reminds me of—um.”  _Germany_ , he thinks, and winces.  It reminds him of Germany.

“I know.”  Bucky touches the woman’s cold throat with his fingertips, but draws his hand back almost immediately.  “But this’s kind of different.”

Steve looks at him.  “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, and glances at Steve for the first time since the combat started.  Steve isn’t sure what the look means, but it seems important, and maybe that’s all that he really needs to know.  “You know what they’re trying to make here, don’t you?”

Steve shakes his head, and Bucky hisses a breath through his teeth.

“Me,” he says, quickly, like he’s taking off a bandaid.  Like speaking requires him to push through pain.  “They’re trying to make another me.”  He steps back from the operating table where the woman is lying, left hand twitching like he’s thinking about making a fist. 

Steve feels his breath harden in his lungs, crystalizing until it’s impossible to swallow, impossible to feel anything that is not sharp while he stands, looking at Bucky, who’s looking away again.  “C’mon,” Steve says softly.  “Let’s go.  We’re done here.”

“No.”  Bucky looks at the woman’s body again, eyes catching on the glint of the fluorescent lights off of her metal throat.  “We need to put her to rest.  Her and the rest of ‘em.”

Steve swallows again, but the feeling’s still there.  Distantly, he hears the faint sound of wind shrieking in his ears, faint, but nonetheless there. “Alright,” he says. 

 

* * *

 

A combination of fire, C4, and Bucky’s small grenade launcher puts an end to the HYDRA base.  It’ll be hell for whoever has to clean it up, but Steve and Bucky sit on the hood of the car and watch the walls crumble and burn anyway. 

“They have all of Zola’s research, even if they don’t have Zola,” Bucky murmurs after a while, when the first rays of sunlight are cresting over the treetops, dusting gold and pink over his stony face.  “It’s only a matter of time before they turn some sorry bastard into an Asset.”

The sun hits Bucky’s face like it’s blessing him.  Steve feels a familiar itch in his palm for a pencil, the desire to sketch Bucky’s face for the thousandth time and preserve this moment for eternity.  There is nothing with which he can draw, though, so the urge goes unanswered, and Steve stays very still and watches Bucky’s eyes trace the path of the sparks that flicker upward toward the slowly lightening sky.  He will preserve the moment with his mind.

“We’re not gonna let that happen,” he says, and reaches out to carefully put his hand on Bucky’s knee.  He moves slowly so Bucky can see the touch coming, and refuse it if he’d rather, but Bucky doesn’t move.  Those ice-blue eyes just watch him.  “You and me?” He squeezes Bucky’s knee ever so gently.  Bucky shudders.  “We’re gonna take care of this.  We are.”

“You don’t have to,” Bucky says, eyes on Steve’s thumb, which is tracing circles into his kneecap.  “Do this.  You don’t.”  Steve gets the feeling that he isn’t talking about the revenge, but they’re used to talking in double, they’re used to it, and Steve knows by now how to speak in layers.  He knows how to do this.

“Buck.”  Steve holds his knee, and he feels it when Bucky tentatively presses his leg a little further into his palm.  “I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t want to.”

Bucky doesn’t seem to know what to do with that, but he doesn’t move away, he just leans ever so slightly into the cupped palm of Steve’s hand and breathes, just breathes.  Steve will never get tired of that, he thinks, watching Bucky’s chest rise and fall after so many years of thinking that heart had stopped, after so much of his life forged by his efforts not to collapse under the weight of missing him.

“Let’s go home,” Bucky says eventually, but he does not move to stand.

“I thought no motel in Jersey was ever gonna be home,” Steve says, mouth tipped upward in a wry smile.

Bucky rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling, just a little, and he tips his face into Steve’s shoulder to hide it.  Steve likes that just fine.  He’d rather keep that smile in the seam of his jacket’s shoulder than anywhere else, he’d like to keep it there, warm and secret, where no one else can see it.

 

* * *

 

When they get back to the hotel, Steve turns on his phone and receives seven text messages, five missed calls, and two voicemails.  He reads them all while Bucky’s in the shower, leaning against the locked bathroom door with his shield propped up against the wall next to him.

 

* * *

 

[ **from** : Natasha (romanON) **sent** : 9:57 PM]

steve, ffs, “i’m with bucky in jersey we’re ok” is not an acceptable answer. where the fuck are u

[ **from** : Natasha (romanON) **sent** : 11:21 PM]

STEVE >:(

[ **from** : Natasha (romanON) **sent** : 12:34 AM]

do not think i won’t bully stark into finding u, he can do it, don’t test me

[ **from** : Natasha (romanON) **sent** : 4:12 AM]

jersey, steve. for real. i thought that was u trying to deflect so i wouldn’t find u. also, next time u make a break for it turn off ur location tracker, dummy

[ **from** : Sam (caw caw motherfucker) **sent** : 4:17 AM]

Nat & I in transit. You’re dumb, but we like you anyway.

[ **from** : Sam (caw caw motherfucker) **sent** : 5:43 AM]

BTW, brought lots of weapons, not as many as Stark wanted us to, but I thought we should probably not be weighed down too much if we’re gonna do what I think we’re doing. I said no to a small missile launcher. Figured Barnes had one already.

[ **from** : Sam (caw caw motherfucker) **sent** : 5:59 AM]

P.S. You didn’t turn off your GPS when you went on the lam? Are you stupid?

 

* * *

 

Bucky is sitting on the bed, toweling off his hair when Steve tells him. 

“Your friends are coming,” Bucky repeats flatly.  “Why?”

“Because they care,” Steve answers, and stops pacing the room to sit heavily next to Bucky on the edge of the bed.  He’s careful to leave a couple inches of space between their legs, just in case the nearness is too much, just in case Bucky would rather decide when and how he is touched. 

Steve should’ve known that Natasha wouldn’t let him run himself into the ground.  He should’ve known that they’d come after him.  It makes something warm begin to unfurl in his chest, that they would track him down like this without prompting, but he knows that their presence will complicate the familiarity he and Bucky are slipping into.  “They want to help us, Buck,” he adds, soft and sincere.  “They both have their own reasons to hate HYDRA as much as we do.”

Bucky laughs, but it isn’t a particularly pleasant sound.  “As much as we do?” he asks incredulously.  “Sure.”

“C’mon, Bucky,” Steve sighs.  “You said yourself that we can’t hit some of those larger bases on our own.  We need them.  And, to be honest, if we’re going to take down all of HYDRA, I’d rather have them at my back so I can focus harder on watching yours.”

Bucky looks at him then, jaw tight, eyes wide, as though he is looking at Steve for the first time all over again.  When he leans forward—determination blooming like a grenade shell behind his open eyes, fingers of his right hand curling into a fist around a handful of Steve’s t-shirt—Steve can see it coming, so he meets him in the middle.  Bucky’s mouth is hot against his own, a rough scrape of stubble against Steve’s cheek, and Steve cradles his face between his palms like he is something precious—he holds Bucky close and kisses him, one hand on the back of Bucky’s neck, the other cupping his cheek.  He gasps when Bucky’s metal fingers meet the small of his back, pulling him closer.  He gasps, and Bucky makes a small pleased sound, and Steve has never wanted anything in his life more than he wants to hear Bucky make that sound again.

“Sorry about earlier,” Bucky whispers when he pulls back, but he doesn’t go far.  He puts his forehead to Steve’s and stays there, one lock of dark hair touching Steve’s cheek, letting them stay close and breathe the same air.  “I didn’t.  I thought this was what we did.”

Steve doesn’t close his eyes for a moment.  Bucky’s eyes are still sharp, still pale and eerie in the dark, but now with the morning sunlight smoothing over his entire face, they don’t look nearly as hollow.

“We’ve never,” he says, just as quiet.  His mouth is tingling, his skin is lit up with new awareness.  He can feel Bucky’s hand on his back through the thin fabric of his shirt.  “But that doesn’t mean we can’t.  If you want to.”

“But I slept in your _bed_ ,” Bucky says, mystified.  Steve laughs, but he winces, also.

“Remember that, huh?” he asks ruefully, and lets the pad of his thumb stroke over the curve of Bucky’s jaw.  “You always told me you did it ‘cause I was so sick.  Think you saved my life a couple times during those awful winters.  Body heat, you know.”

Steve can feel Bucky’s neck move under his hand when Bucky swallows.  Bucky’s quiet for a while, thinking.  His fingers stroke lightly over Steve’s spine, thumb catching on the dip between two of his vertebrae.

And Steve thinks back to all those many years ago, when Bucky would sling an arm around his skinny shoulders and bend their heads close together while they walked, his whole body turning toward Steve’s like the head of a sunflower turning toward the sun.  He thinks about the dates, those terrible double dates, where Bucky would drink himself silly and dance with both the girls by the end of the night.  Steve would sit at the bar, nursing his one glass, and would watch him with a fondness that hurt, smiling back when Bucky shot a grin at him over a girl’s shoulder, eyes beaming.

Steve thinks about this, now, and wonders if he missed the tone of the entire first two decades of his life.  The sun is shining through the thin slice of window between the hotel curtains, and Bucky is still touching him, and Steve thinks he could live like this, maybe.  If he tries.

“How long until they get here?” Bucky asks.

Steve glances at the clock.  “About half an hour.”

“And they’ll help us?”

Steve nods, feeling Bucky’s unsteady exhalation when it hits his cheek.  “They’re good people.  They aren’t Dum Dum and Morita, but they’re pretty close.”

Bucky makes a small noise of assent, eyes drifting closed.  Steve can understand the urge to do so—sometimes he can only focus on one sensation at a time.  Bucky’s forehead resting against his own or the glint of sunlight off his eyes, Bucky’s hand splayed over the dip of his spine or the pale column of Bucky’s throat when he tips his head back to laugh.  One at a time.  One at a time or his heart can’t take it.

“If you tell me we need to run now, I’ll run,” Steve murmurs, stroking through Bucky’s damp, dark hair with his fingertips.  “We’ll dump my phone, take off right now.  We don’t have to stick around and wait for them to find us if you don’t want to.”

Bucky looks, for a moment, with a crease forming between his eyebrows, that he would like nothing more than to say _yes, let’s run_ , but he doesn’t.  He just opens his eyes again, clear and blue, so blue, and holds Steve close to him.  (Steve wasn’t planning on moving, anyway.)

“You seem to trust them,” Bucky says at last.  “And we need the help.”

“We do,” Steve agrees.  His heart soars.

 

* * *

 

Bucky sets up the map on the rickety bedside table, relenting at Steve’s insistence before he actually stabs his knife through the tabletop to keep the map in place.  (“Don’t damage hotel property,” Steve says, exasperated.  “Says the man who burned down an entire HYDRA base earlier this morning for fun,” Bucky challenges, but he puts the knife down.)

Steve does an inventory on their weapons.  He’s starting to regret the body count business, because he knows that Natasha will want numbers; both times he and Bucky have begun the slaughter, though, he lost track of whose heart was beating within moments of starting.  The only heart that matters much is Bucky’s, after all, and that was where he’d put his focus.

Feeling as though he must look thoroughly suspicious—all of their weapons laid out on one of the beds like a banquet—he puts his hands on his hips and sighs, glancing over at Bucky, who’s bent over the map with a look of concentration on his face and his bent elbows resting on the edge of the table.  Bucky’s hair is twisted into a messy bun on the top of his head, now, and the sight of it is endearing enough that Steve can’t help but smile.  Bucky catches him looking, and his answering smile is both lopsided and so familiar that it aches.

“They’ll be here any minute now,” Bucky says.  “You ready?”

“Think so,” Steve says, looking back over his shoulder at their ominous array of weapons.  Not for the first time, he feels like a mercenary dressed up like chorus girl, but at least he doesn’t have to put on the stars and stripes for this mission.  _Fuck Cap_ , he thinks, and smiles.  “You know where we’re headed?”

Bucky taps the map with two fingers, prompting Steve to come over and look where he’s pointing.  Steve’s hand meets the small of Bucky’s back as he joins him, chin resting on the top of Bucky’s shoulder.

“New York,” Bucky says, fingertips brushing the red circle around the name.  “Second biggest base in the country.  It’s—important.  That it gets clean.”

“Yeah, I know,” Steve says softly.  Brooklyn, he hasn’t been back to Brooklyn since an ill-advised road trip that left him shaking for a week.  Too many ghosts, he thinks, and too little space; only enough room for him to see Bucky on every corner, to fall to his knees in an alleyway like he’s seventeen and choking on his own tongue again.

There’s a rap on the door, and Bucky’s head whips around so fast that Steve gets a faceful of hair. 

“Rogers, I swear to god, if you’re about to jump out the window, we are going to have _words_ ,” comes Sam’s voice, muffled through the door, but still easily discernable.  Bucky makes a strange choking sound that Steve quickly realizes is _laughter_.

“Go on, let them in,” Bucky says, and only hesitates a moment before he swoops in and steals another kiss, soft and quick, gone again before Steve has a chance to react.  He gives Steve’s back a little shove. “Go!”

So Steve goes to the door with his heart doing something strange in his chest, his mouth warm, his back warm where Bucky touched it.  Bucky’s laughter is warm in his ears, in his heart.  He opens the door and looks sheepishly out at his friends, both of them trying to peer around him subtly to get a look at Bucky.

“Hey,” Steve says.  “C’mon in. Bucky and I—”  And what a thing that is to say, _Bucky and I_.  “—We’re going to take New York.  Come with us?”

Natasha sighs.  “I guess one battle of New York was never going to be enough for us,” she says, and Steve thinks he catches a little relief in her voice.  But then, it’s never easy to tell, with Natasha.

“Wouldn’t have trekked all the way out here if the answer to that question was gonna be no,” Sam says gently.  “You gonna let us in?”

Steve looks back at Bucky, who’s got his mismatched arms crossed over his chest, who’s got a look of such intense fondness on his face that Steve is pinned where he stands.  He doesn’t know how he’s lived this long without that look.  He doesn’t know how he will ever manage without it again.

“Let ‘em in, Steve,” Bucky says.  “I wanna meet the people who managed to put up with you this whole time.”

So Steve does.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm barneswilson on tumblr! Come say hi :)


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